political-handbooks-iii-the-state-as-a-form-of-life - Relações Internacionais (2024)

Rudolf Kjellén

Political Handbooks III

The State as a Lifeform

A Translation Project

V. 0.1.1

Based on 1916 Swedish edition

Table of Contents

Preface........................................................................................................................................................6

Introduction: On the Self-Reflection of the Political Science....................................................................8

I. The General Nature of the State...........................................................................................................12

I.1. Experiential Analysis № 1 The Constitutional-Legal Concept of the State, or the Internal

Concept................................................................................................................................................12

I.1.1. The State as a Judicial Subject..............................................................................................12

I.1.2. The State as Household and Society.....................................................................................13

I.1.3. The Constitutional-Legal Concept of the State in Contemporary Scholarship.....................14

I.2. Experiential Analysis № 2 The International-Legal Concept of the State, or the External Concept

.............................................................................................................................................................16

I.2.1. The State as Realm and People.............................................................................................18

I.3. The Right of the Political Science to these Studies.......................................................................20

I.3.1. Elements of the Political Science..........................................................................................22

I.4. The Organic Unity of the State.....................................................................................................24

I.4.1. Biopolitical Method...............................................................................................................25

1.5. Scope of the Political Science......................................................................................................26

I.5.1. System and Plan of Investigation..........................................................................................27

II. The State as Realm: Geopolitics..........................................................................................................30

II.1. Integration of the Realm within the State....................................................................................30

II.2. Different Realm Types: City and Country...................................................................................31

II.3. The “Life Property” of the State Under the Realm......................................................................33

II.3.1. The Organic Interpretation: the Body of the State...............................................................34

II.3.2. International-Legal Consequences.......................................................................................35

II.3.3. Practical-Political Consequences.........................................................................................36

II.4. The Geographical Individuality...................................................................................................38

II.4.1. Natural Borders, Different Types.........................................................................................38

II.4.2. The Natural Territory and Its Types.....................................................................................40

II.4.3. Solution to the Problem of the Realm..................................................................................42

II.4.4. Impact of the State upon the Realm.....................................................................................42

II.5. Perishability of the State and Immortality of the Realm.............................................................43

II.6. The Problem of Private Property.................................................................................................44

II.7. Special Geopolitics: Influences of Space, Shape, and Position...................................................45

II.7.1. Space....................................................................................................................................45

II.7.2. Shape....................................................................................................................................47

II.7.3. Position................................................................................................................................47

II.7.4. Transformations of Position.................................................................................................48

II.7.5. Historical Sides....................................................................................................................50

II.8. Conclusion, Geopolitics...............................................................................................................50

III. The State as People: Ethnopolitics.....................................................................................................52

III.1. Connection of the People with the State....................................................................................52

III.1.1. Connection of the People through the Time.......................................................................53

III.1.2. Loyalty and Nationality......................................................................................................55

III.2. The Problem of the Nation.........................................................................................................56

III.2.1. The Genealogical Solution.................................................................................................57

III.2.2. The Linguistic Solution......................................................................................................58

III.2.3. The Psychological Solution................................................................................................59

III.3. The Biological Solution..............................................................................................................60

III.3.1. An Ethnic Individual...........................................................................................................60

III.3.2. On the Strength of the Nationality......................................................................................61

III.3.3. On the Qualities of the Nation............................................................................................61

III.3.4. Nations as Natural Essences...............................................................................................62

III.4. Emergence of Nations................................................................................................................63

III.5. Maturity of Nations....................................................................................................................66

III.5.1. The Nationality Principle....................................................................................................67

III.5.2. Consequences of the Nationality Principle.........................................................................68

III.5.3. Opponents of the Nationality Principle..............................................................................69

III.5.4. Guarantors of the Nationality Principle..............................................................................71

III.5.5. The Law of Ethnic Individuation........................................................................................72

III.6. The Problem of Race..................................................................................................................73

abolish if the science is to fulfill its

duty to the truth. We may, though, not labor with two separate political sciences: one of the own state as

52 regeringsformen, one of (presently) four components of Sweden’s constitution.

an absolute legal state and a rational entity, and another of foreign states as petty beings of interest

alone! In the name of science we must demand that unity in the understanding, which in turn follows

with respect for actuality.

Herewith are by no means denied those special investigations, belonging to philosophy, which

measure the state against the ideal and consequently celebrate therein a rational being; all the less

denied is the real evolutionary tendency, which seeks to overcome the dualism of the state-life in

direction of the supremacy of justice; all the least shall it be disputed, that this development is for the

better. We can only establish the fact that the states as we follow them in history and in reality have to

move within are sensual-rational beings, much like humans.

I.3.1. Elements of the Political Science

It is now clear that we have reached the decisive point of our investigation, and it would do well to

better fix the perspective.

The realities given by history, which we denote as states, appear different before our eyes

depending on whether the perspective is that of the inside or the outside. In one case, the point of

vantage is placed within the state’s own civic sphere; the individual treads out of his connection with

the whole and turns his gaze thereon—he sees then first a judicial phenomenon, therein a social and an

economic, far away in the end an ethnic and a geographic; but the last do not seem to disturb in him the

great impression of a dominating juridical appearance. This is a state-judicial concept: Boströms

“public” state-society, with the private ones as necessary backdrop. It is that state whose concept is

included in compound expressions such as “form of government,” “coup d'état,” “state interest,” “state

calendar,” “state railroads”53; always seen from the inside and from below, in its contrast to private

groups and interests. In the other case we see the same reality placed not before subjects but among

equals, in objective shape as one among many in a great family; then it is as the other side of a hand,

and the eye falls first on the geographic and the ethnic picture, further the economic and the social, and

the system of justice hides now in the background. It is that international-legal concept, that state which

enters into associations of states, which belongs to a system of states, which is listed in “The

Statesman’s Yearbook”; the individual no longer stands as an observer, he enters the greater context,

and we see the ship-of-state54 with all the citizens aboard steer its path through history.

On these different perspectives depends the shift of mindset between “states” and “powers.” But

that it here in reality is a question of identity, that is not proved merely by the synonymy of state and

power (see I.2.); we can strengthen the proof also from the other side by that habit of language which

permits saying “power” in place of “state”—for instance in our Instrument of Government §86, where

the state’s censorship is denoted as obstacles placed “by the public power.” In the term “state,” the

accent falls thus preferentially on the side of the legal system; in the term “power,” on the physical

manifestation; but it is fundamentally the same being, which here appears “as if with two souls, one

internal judicially bound and one external free,” to speak with Piloty55.

53 statsskick (lit. “form of state”), statsform, statskupp eller statsstreck, statsintresse, statskalender, statsjärnvägar

54 statsskepp, notion present in Plato’s Republic

55 Piloty, “Staaten als Mächte und Mächte als Staaten,” in Zeitschrift für Völkerrecht 1914. The author naturally

emphasizes that this dualism should be overcome in a growing magnitude of justice. (author)

To sharply fix the concept shift we must think of that genus proximum where our Sweden is

contained as a species: the first analysis gives as result the constitutional form of state, the other the

European state-system. They are, as one sees, quite distinct perspectives. But they are not mutually

exclusive. Sweden belongs in fact to both genera and acts as a state in both. It is thus the same object in

both cases, and the difference depends only on the variable emphasis.

We remark further, that both concepts are not equal in scope. The inner is contained within the

outer. The law is one aspect of the state among several. The state as power is the wider concept, which

embraces the state as justice—not vice versa.

The power of language over thought, here backed by a practical illusion, has thus far drawn

boundaries for the political science, in the whole practiced one-sidedly to the advantage of the

narrower, judicial state concept, while statistics and geography have extended their hands for the wider,

factual concept. Time seems now in to seriously claim the political science’s right to the latter too. We

have by necessity a political science which synthetically rises above the old political science’s thesis

and geography’s antithesis. We can no longer stop at an either-or in the factual state’s rich nature; we

require a both-and, both the customary organization and the natural organism. No longer the state’s

judicial side, at its height peppered with the household- and social aspects, but the entire state as it

manifests in actual life.

We have already found our science placed in a sort of “correction leftward,” in that the

community in its social no less than economic shape are found to lie within its sphere of interest. The

synthetic understanding entails a continuation of this orientation, all the way to people and country.

This political science embraces not only the husband and the house picture56 and the household, but

also the house servants and the house. Only in this scope can our science fulfill its task to exhaust its

object; and in the extent to which it therewith succeeds, the great gap in the organization of our

knowledge (see I.2.) finally becomes filled as well.

It seems as if ground ought now be ready for this expansion of the political-scientific horizon.

In Germany itself the opposition to the one-sided legal perspective has begun to make itself perceptible

in this direction also. So proclaims Richard Schmidt in 1903, under criticism by Jellinek’s “political

history of literature,” that the power moment of state has become all too underappreciated: political

science may no longer stop at the moment of justice and leave the former to history57. And since Penck

established the limitation of geography in this piece (see I.2.1.), he imagines in the future a reformed

“Staatenkunde—welche den Staat nicht bloss als rechtliche Institution sondern als lebenden

Organismus mit sehr verschiedenen Funktionen betrachtet”58; not a mere statistic of the old kind, but an

“Erfassung des gesammten staatlichen Lebens.”5960 This is exactly the same program as is developed

here.

56 Hustaflan, Haustafel referring to a section of Martin Luther’s Small Catechism, which describes the components of

society and their purpose.

57 See Allgem. Staatslehre, II, 829-30. (author)

58 “Political science, in which the state is viewed not as a mere judicial institution, but as a living organism with various

functions.”

59 “Embrace of the entire stately life”

60 Op. cit. p. 237-9. This Staatenkunde receives its natural place between history and geography.—Penck’s statement

reached me only after the development of above-mentioned presentation. (author)

I.4. The Organic Unity of the State

But how is it now going with the political science’s need to assert its home among the sciences? This

was the other side of that problem which lies before us to solve. If already the expansion

into the social

sphere, as we saw above, increased the competition in the area, should it not be purely overwhelming to

let another pair of subjective spheres be drawn into the circle of our science? Perhaps it may seem that

way initially. In the next instance we find that exactly this expansion of the frontier, and nothing less

than it, is what gives our science the previously missing unity.

This unity is that of life and personality. The new political science is deeply haunted by the

conviction for which Ranke in his own way appeared as an advocate in the great world61—that in its

object the question is of superindividual lives, as real as the private individuals, only immeasurably

greater and more powerful in their developmental progress. It is truly impossible to avoid this

impression of the (see I.2.) latest deployed analysis of reality. These states speak and trade, sit together

at congresses and fight on battlefields, envy and hate or sympathize with each other, tempt and flee

from each other, help and hinder one another as other living beings in a community. Each and every

one acts like an individual for itself, with its own character, its special interests, its manner of dealing,

its world of feelings: “ein mächtiges Lebewesen mit selbständigen Zielen”62, superior to both the

private and the social spheres, as Menzel says63. What an intensive personal impression they make, that

can be seen best by the people’s imaginations’ willingness to individualize them to the point of having

personal names and human shape: so do we all know “Mother Svea,” a woman much like “la Belle

France”; and one does not need to browse the Review of Reviews long to see “John Bull” or “Uncle

Sam,” always the same, like characters in a mask play64. Governments change, generations shift, but

the powers seem to remain their own likes, changing only in secular rhythm at least. Against their long,

wide, and deep traditions, the individuals may only exercise a limited influence. They are objective

realities outside and above the individuals, at the same time within them, and stand in their own manner

themselves under the power of life’s fundamental laws.

So appear the states in the state-systems, and so do they appear even clearer in the past history,

where former days’ loud murmur has been laid to rest. Popular imaginations have now in themselves

no scientific value, but they gain it when they attest and adjust the result of an objective investigation.

All the while since Plato first saw the state in human shape, the question of the state’s personal nature

has not left the agenda of philosophers. All the while since Menenius Agrippa on the “sacred mountain”

demonstrated the fable of the stomach an the limbs has the understanding of the state as an organism

61 See Ranke, Die grossen Mächte (“The Great Powers”), 1883. On the connection to Ranke see the latest Meinecke in

Die neue Rundschau, june 1916, p. 721: “Wir Historiker aus der Rankeschen Schule begrüssen Freudig den Siegeszug

dieser uns längst vertrauten Auffassungsweise auf dem Gebiete der Staatswissenschaften” (“We, historians of the

Rankian school, happily welcome the victory parade of our long familiar way of understanding of the domain of

political science). Note here though Pohle’s reservation in Zeitschr. für Sozialwissenschaft 1916, p. 677—Before Ranke

comes Adam Müller 1809, see Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, I, ch. 7, and “L. v. Ranke und der

Machtstaatsgedanke” by Max Fischer in Das Grössere Deutschland 20/5 1916. (author)

62 “A powerful living being with independent goals.”

63 Op. cit. p. 79, M. places this construction in deliberate opposition to those who in the state only see an institution of

defense for citizen and a judge for their disputes—therefore in agreement with the viewpoints elaborated here. (author)

64 Uncle Sam may be a sketch based on a late head of state’s (Lincoln) personal image; the rest are figures of imagination.

As familiar, animal figures such as “the Russian bear” or heraldic charges such as the German eagle are employed.

not abandoned the practical statesmen. Discussion on these topics degrades easily into squabbles about

words, at the same time as one presses the concept of personhood into one of pure reason or on the

other hand lowers the concept of organism to that of the purely animal or even vegetable lifecycle65; but

if the essential of an organism is this, that it in the struggle for existence may of own intrinsic power

evolve, and if the essential of the concept of personhood is that this development proceeds in the

direction of greater spiritual certainty—then the discussion pertaining to the character of states must be

considered concluded.

To us, Swedes, this view of the state should be all the less foreign, as it has a powerful

representative already in that man whose name is most closely associated with the origin of our still

relevant constitution. No one has more clearly and with greater conviction than Hans Järta taught that

the state “lives,” that it is an “organic individuum,” a “purpose in itself, an I,” that legal protection is

merely one of its tasks, a means of achieving yet nobler purposes66. The modern understanding has

therefore proud domestic forebears outside the social circle (see I.1.3.) too. But, certainly, behind both

Järta and Ranke lie the deep furrows of the Historical School.

I.4.1. Biopolitical Method

“From a certain standpoint,” as I expressed in a 1905 work on The Great Powers, “one cannot avoid to,

in the great powers themselves, also recognize biological facts. By own lifeforce and economic

blessing, in constant competition against each other, that is, through a struggle for space and through

natural selection, they have emerged on the surface of the earth. We see them be born and grow, we

have also seen them wilt and die as other organisms. They are in this wise forms of organisms; among

all lifeforms on this earth the most imposing. As such, one must be able to make them objects also for

a, so to speak, biopolitical study, which seeks to explore laws of their development.” What is here

expressed about great powers is, naturally, true concerning states in general. Here lies in a nutshell

already that political teaching which I have now sought to scientifically motivate and better determine.

One has called this teaching “vergleichende Politik”67. In that case it seems to be on the right

track; at least it was first through the comparative method that geography and linguistics entered their

stage of a modern science. Here, thus, similar prospects for political science open up, namely, if it as

the basis of comparison lays the concrete state-lives, aside from special disciplines which study legal

organizations and abstract state-ideas. Only as a political science in an exact sense—a science of the

“ships-of-state,” rather than the forms of state68, of the states and not just the state-powers,

“Staatenkunde” instead of “Staatswissenschaft”—find we for the state study’s account an independent

space among modern areas of study.

65 For this reason we are not impressed by the remark that states lack reproductive organs, or what Jellinek otherwise has

to propose against the organic theory, pp. 150-, likewise not by his denunciation of “those who interpret the state as a

natural formation standing beside or above human beings,” p. 175; compare Stier-Somlo pp. 73- and Boethius Om

statslifvet, 1916, pp. 22-26. (author)

66 See refs. at Wallengren, ob.cit. pp. 40-44, 53-54. Justice for the state is, according to Järta, as the bark on the tree

necessary for protection, but it is not where the state’s life “blooms and gives fruit.” (author)

67 “Er hat ein ganz neues Gebiet der Wissenschaft genommen: die vergleichende Politik” (“He has taken on an entirely

new field of science: comparative politics”), Ernst Posselt in Hamb. Fremdenblatt 31/12 1915, review of my work Die

Grossmächte

der Gegenwart. (author)

68 Pun. ship-of-state—statsskepp, form of state—statsskick.

Before this sight, the formal order of justice does in no wise lose its meaning, as little as it is the

meaning to in a division of labor dispute the justification of those who handle one particular thing. Its

development shall always make up a strong indicator of the strength or weakness of a particular state.

But the guardian thereof shows himself now to be only one among several motives behind the actions

of the state. Instead we shall learn to know a new primary motive, wherein this is contained as part. It is

the political unity of purpose, use-value and need. Here the state has its moral principle. Here has the

science of the state that unity in diversity which the old statistics (see I.3.) lacked, and subsequently

also an own perspective, which it does not share with any other science—the last seal to its full

independence and equality in the republic of science.

In particular, we notice the emancipation from history. If one says that this political science’s

scope has become unreasonably large, one needs only a reference to history, which extends to the same

magnitude and more thereto, and this through all past times! But even political history has no direct

interest in these great phenomena which we call states, other than when they are in motion. She is

bound by the time perspective as an “active” science; while the political science has its space

perspective and its primarily descriptive method. In historical events, besides, the state is only one form

among many: the church, the corporation, the individual, all of which must interest history. To the

political science in our sense, history therefore becomes an assistive science—and vice versa—and

becomes necessary as such, but not more. We see a relationship by affinity, but no longer identity.

This change of perspective, through which the widespread international-legal concept of state—

the state as power—is placed in the foreground as the object of political science instead of that of

formal law—the state as a subject of justice—means therefore at once the filling of a great vacancy in

our educational organization and the independence proclamation of political science itself. It ought

therefore not escape anyone to which degree such a way of seeing is dedicated at once to refresh and to

deepen that study which we denote “political science.” In this sense, our science shall certainly be able

to expect greater popular attention than when it only held law and history by the dress, and therefore be

in a better position to fertilize the common idea with its great educational value, to be of greater

immediate service also within the practical politics.

1.5. Scope of the Political Science

We summarize briefly our fundamental remarks. Political science among us has long, after particularly

German patterns, limited its domain to that of law; thus, it has not been able to preserve for itself an

independent place among the sciences, and has consequently ceased in its growth to the harm also of

the people, which herewith has received insufficient nourishment from a knowledge source of

imminent practical significance. The state itself has now invalidated this understanding as too narrow

by obviously taking upon itself economically and socially productive purposes. An outwardly facing

perspective on the factually existing states likewise draws to light that geographical and ethnographic

elements determine their being with a previously perhaps underestimated intimacy. There exists already

in our language use a wider state-concept, in which the accent falls exactly on this aspect of their being.

When we speak of the state, therefore, we do not need to think of the state power as opposed to the

individual sphere. There is a kind of state which in its form is not a mere aggregate of juridical letters

in the framework of an external measure, as little as an institution of assurance for the judicial

establishment. It is before anything else a life, with the risk of life and the power of life and the right of

life. It is, as I have written in the preface to the first edition of the previously mentioned work on the

Great Powers, a “striving and action, with shifting means and purposes at different periods of time for

different states; to know these means and purposes is certainly no less important for a true political

science than to know the framework of institutions and judicial rules and mathematical dimensions

within which the acting persons have to move.” Here we meet first a task of purely quantitative kind, to

expand the circles of the study; it is new countries to explore and integrate with the old, new elements

to analyze in the factual state entity which one thus far has understood as a simple, juridical subject.

Within this quantitative extension, though, let the need of qualitative deepening, through which

connection and unity are preserved by the law of the political life, always stay in sight.

I.5.1. System and Plan of Investigation

The pictures of the state-life’s foremost representatives which I have given in my works on the Great

Powers have in their entirety and with growing purposefulness69 intended to constitute practical

experiments and supports for the fundamental view which is here strengthened by the means of a

theoretical and critical investigation. The thus internally facing investigation becomes mostly

descriptive. Its general premise is the empirical observation of the factually existing states. It considers

every state at times as realm, as household, as people, as society, as dominion70 or subject of justice,

without stopping at any particular of these determinants: with a glance into it they become

manifestations of one and the same life—five elements with the same power, five fingers on the same

hand, which work together in peace and which punch in war.

With this key in hand it also becomes easy to distinguish natural boundaries for our science with

respect to other areas of knowledge. Its left wing is not geography, but geopolitics71; its object is not the

land, but always and exclusively that of the political organization governing the land—that is to say, the

69 See preface; note also Political Problems of the World War, 1915, where the dynamic point of view was brought forth in

place of the static. (Otto Hintze in Sokrates, june 1916, p. 291) . (author)

70 realm—rike; household—hushåll, meaning economy; people—folk; society—samhälle; dominion—herradöme.

71 geopolitik

realm. It’s right is not formal justice nor much less the history of law, but the politics of law and

administration, or, in a single term (in connection to an expression revived by C. A. Reuterskiöld)

regimental politics7273; the boundary here is already drawn by Fahlbeck, most lately when he in Finsk

Tidskrift, February 1916, places his “typological-political” manner of viewing a legal question against

Hermansson’s purely juridical.74 In the center itself sits the study of the politically organized human

mass which upholds the actions of the state, or the people: not ethnography, but ethnopolitics75.

Between this this discipline and that of the geopolitics we meet the study of the people in its productive

life, or the state as household: not national economics, but economic politics76. Between ethnopolitics

and the regimental politics lies ultimately the study of the people in its naturally and culturally educated

components, that is to say, the state as society in specific sense: not sociology, but sociopolitics77.

Theoretically, the initial trails are ready. That they in practice often may show themselves less easy to

explore follows by the nature of the item, as the territories of sciences are never separated by sharp

border walls or even fixed lines.

Thus the system gives itself away by inner necessity from

the thesis. In the given five

directions, the nature of every state is exhausted in an inescapable circulation, where the different

elements mutually condition one another, so that each one acts in part for itself and in part for the

others. As we now move to examine each on its own, so shall the demonstration therefore embrace not

only the distinct qualities of each element of the state’s nature, but also the inner connections between

them, in which the state’s internal unity manifests itself.

It seems to me as if the time has come to recognize and to seek to map the new lands which

have been shown to lie in the possession of political science as preliminary work to the final system. In

this presentation, attention will fall primarily on the realm and the people: the domains of geopolitics

and ethnopolitics. In these, the biological character of the state also appears most immediate and

necessary. They present themselves before others as objective categories by which the actions of the

state are bound. They can therefore be denoted as the state’s especially natural aspect; against

household, society, and regiment as its cultural aspect, where its will appears to be more creative and

72 law—författning, used to mean both constitution and law in general; administration—förvaltning; regimental politics—

regimentspolitik.

73 See “Regimentet I Sverige” (“The Regimen in Sweden”) Statsvetensk. Tidskrift, 1911, also Föreläsningar i svensk

stats- och förvaltningsrätt (“Lectures In Swedish Constitutional Justice”), I, “Statsregementet,” 1914. (author)

74 See now Fahlbeck, Engelsk parlamentarism contra svensk (“English Parliamentarianism Contra Swedish”), 1916, p. 96.

Compare already Svensk författning och den moderna parlamentarismen (“Law of Sweden and the Modern

Parliamentarianism”), 2904, pp. 89-90, 92. (author)

75 etnopolitik; later the author correct this concept to demopolitik, “demopolitics.” See Davidsen, p. 304. In light of the

author’s distinction between the concepts of “people” (that is, demos) and “nation” (ethnos), the former alone being an

element of the state (see further section III.1.), demopolitics may be the more appropriate term for this category. In the

original edition, the term “demopolitics” is briefly discussed in a footnote on the second page of chapter III; that

footnote is reproduced in the same chapter of this translation.

76 ekonomipolitik. There is a tendency among translators of these concepts to, because the compound words of geopolitik,

etnopolitik, and sociopolitik translate so naturally to single words in English, also attempt to render the other two

categories by some form of single-word compound (rather than a combination of two words each, as was done here).

We can justify the apparent inconsistency of not doing so by noticing that the former three compound words are formed

by the Greek-style interfix -o-, the remaining two are not; therefore, the difference is already present in the Swedish

terms.

77 sociopolitik

free. They form therefore the central point in a depiction of the state as a lifeform, while the other

primarily show the state as a cultural form; wherewith one may apparently not stop in a schematic

contrast, as the state-personality’s connection concedes a record of the free will within the “natural”

side, albeit not to the same degree as the pressure of need on the shifting forms of the “cultural” side.

Even the epistemological situation too mandates a greater part of the attention to the natural

factors within the nature of the state. It is in this part where science has the greatest need for

stimulation; not to speak of the vulgar interpretation, according to which the peoples and states—or

purely just the individual statesmen for their part—shape their fates in full freedom given the impulse

of the moment. Such harmful prejudices will not be overcome until the science itself has had its eyes

sharpened for the frame around the freedom of the state’s will, which rises from objective and relatively

constant factors, primarily within realm and people.

It is therefore not a complete and uniform political teaching that will be developed here. The

investigation of the state as a lifeform has for complement an investigation of the state as a cultural

form. It is only the former task which is presented here for treatment. And the plan of investigation

offers itself as a clear consequence of the preceding viewpoints: a sharper focus, in sequence, on the the

specific natural elements of the state—realm and people—but on the part of the others only a

highlighting of the inner connections through which the natural factors influence them too.

Second Chapter

The State as Realm78: Geopolitics

Geopolitics is the study of the state as a geographical organism, or a manifestation in the space: that is,

the state as country, territory, property, or, most pregnantly, realm. As a political science, it has its

constant focus on the state’s unity and seeks to contribute to the understanding of the state’s nature,

while political geography studies the earth as residence for human communities in its relationship to

the other properties of the earth.

II.1. Integration of the Realm within the State

It has already been noted that the realm is that aspect which first catches the eye as we view the state

from the outside. We have also seen a confirmation thereof in the nomenclature of certain states with

geographical compounds. When we denote by the name of England the powerful hero of history who

has covered a large fraction of the world map with its traditionally red color, we appear to place a

geographical image to the forefront. Other famous examples are Russia, Finland, Greece, Germany,

Holland, or more properly the Netherlands (Low Countries)79. While the word is certainly also used for

provinces (Västergötland, Friesland, Jutland), our language reserves the word realm exclusively to full

states, and that too is often included in names, such as France, Austria, the German Reich, and, veiled

by evolution of language and pronunciation, our own Sweden80. A geographical nomenclature is also

Denmark (Dane March); similarly, even more masked, Norway81. For the same reason we hail the state

as fatherland82, motherland, although these concepts contain more than space. It is almost as when we

name famous representatives to the riksdag83 of the peasant estate after their residencies: Påboda,

Stallerhult.84

Other peoples do not seem to be equally sensitive to the state’s territorial property, to judge by a

more reserved nomenclature of this kind. So do the Germans, analogously to us, say “Deutsches Reich”

or “Deutschland” and “Frankreich,” but call our own state “Schweden,” which in Swedish would

correspond to “Svenskien”; here thus the ethnic element takes the front. Englishmen and Frenchmen as

well have similar ungeographic names for Germany-Allemagne and France. This difference in name-

giving is here only of curiosity value; for it is obvious and does not need to be discussed that the

country also in modern English and French eyes is an inescapable property of a state. We cannot think

the country away from the state without losing the concept of the state itself.

The purposeful will, even with organized power, is therefore not sufficient for a state to be.

Without country it is a social existence, but no more. The Hansa once had a real sphere of power which

78 rike

79 Ryssland, Finland, Grekland, Tyskland, Holland, Nederland (Nederländerna)—all have -land in the Swedish name.

80 Frankrike, Österrike, Tyska riket, Sverige (from Svea rike).

81 Danmark, Norge (Norwegen).

82 Original version uses the expression fosterland, from att fostra—“to raise” (a child).

83 Riksdag (compare German Reichstag) is the name of the Swedish parliament. Traditionally, it was a gathering of

representatives for the four estates: clergy, nobility, burghers, and peasants.

84 Alfred

Petersson i Påboda (1860-1920), Carl Persson i Stallerhult (1844-1926).

threatened, for example, the Swedish realm’s economic independence, but a state it was not.

Norddeutsche Lloyd has its business branched out across the world’s seas, but all of its ships and

offices make no state as such. The modern trade unions and associations may win large clienteles and

expand themselves (as the Universal Postal Union) over almost the entire earth, but they own as such

no land and gain therefore never the quality or rank of state. Just as little can even the greatest personal

connection and the richest donations in union with the strictest organization make, for example, the

Jesuit order a state; but the Teutonic Order became one in the 13th century by winning and organizing a

country. Greatest of all societies, if we do not count the state, is the church, and the greatest of all

churches is the Universal Catholic: she is perhaps to be counted as a great power even today, she has

still in her “dead hand” immeasurable riches, she has an incomparably strong organization in

monarchic form, and her monarch is the equal of sovereigns; but all of this is not sufficient to give her

the form of the state, since the old and proper Papal State was drawn into the Kingdom of Italy in the

year of 1870—left in the Pope’s possession are only the three splinters of the Vatican with its garden,

the Lateran church, and the pleasure palace by Lake Albano. Only the municipality shares with the state

the necessary territorial character, but lacks on the other hand its full right of sovereignty.

From this fundamental viewpoint it follows that the people may be organized before the state. It

is always so in the primary state formation. Our Germanic forebears already had a well-formed law

before they halted their travels and seated themselves to form states. Settlement does not alone separate

states from wild wandering hordes, but also from highly developed nomadic tribes; and when we back

in time see people as strictly ordered as for example in the “Kobong system” of the Australian

wilderness, but without any organized land, we denote this form of organization, without justice, as a

kin state85; this is merely a kin society86.

Just as the ethnic element is thus genetically prior to the territorial, so has it also placed that

other element in its shadow within the sphere of our science. The ancient, and still also those of the

“Natural Law,” political philosophers looked past it in their definitions of state; and hence the old

Klüber in 1817 may be the first who in his speculations on the nature of the state considered the

geographical component87. This first postulate already, that every state by necessity presupposes a

country, denotes therefore to some degree a modern viewpoint.

II.2. Different Realm Types: City and Country

This is connected to the eye-catching change of the character of the state’s property. No one who has

read the history of the ancient time can avoid observing that its states are typically named after cities;

we follow Athens’, Sparta’s, Thebes’ fates, we see the struggles between Rome and Carthage, we see

Rome stretch itself across its entire cultural sphere and still be known as Rome. When we instead say

Greece or Italy, this denotes a change of reality. Ancients states were cities, their territories a mere city

area, even if a wide countryside was counted to it; state-life pulsed within the city walls alone, the

country was only moderately a participant thereof. This territorial type is thus the city with annexes of

country. The first step outside this type was taken in 88 B.C., when Italy beyond Rome attained

85 ättstat

86 ättsamhälle

87 Jellinek, p. 395 (author)

citizenship in the state of Rome, and the second 300 years later, when the Empire in its great entirety

was similarly naturalized; therewith the eternal city was in reality degraded from the rank of state to the

rank of capital within a realm. The same territorial basis was possessed by that remnant of the ancient,

which with a center in Byzantium vegetated another millennium and more in time. Although the

enormous centralization of these empires gave the capitals an entirely different weight with respect to

the countryside in comparison to modern states still.

The Western European middle age came as usual with a type which forms the polar opposite of

the ancient’s. Now the state concept vanishes completely into the country, terra; the conquering natural

household, together with the poor condition of communications, invoked the image of traveling courts

which lived on the domains without stronghold even in a capital—no modern traveling king or

traveling emperor may compete against Charlemagne, who (according to Lamprecht’s calculation) rode

12,000 miles88 in his reign! With further development this type is also eventually supplanted by the

late-Roman, as the absolute monarchy of the 17th-18th centuries overall has an inner friendship with the

Byzantinism; we see therefore again strongly prominent capitals, and the French nobility’s pull from

the countryside to Versailles bears witness of that it was not merely the administration which was

concentrated therein. From this type the distribution and equalizing of capital and other territories come

to be which mark a modern European realm89.

Besides this general development, the city state has also seen a reincarnation. It occurred at the

end of the medieval, in connecting to the blooming of the burghers’ affairs, in three primary theaters:

part in Northern Italy (Venice, Genoa, Florence), part in Flanders (Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp), part in

Germany with its “Reichsstädte,”90 which after the Peace of Westphalia had the same sovereignty under

the shield of the Empire as the German countries, and by the time of the system’s dissolution were 51,

or almost as many as there are countries overall in the current time. A powerful representative of the

newer city states of the old Roman sort was Venice all the way to the French revolution. Nowadays,

most of the sovereign cities have been swallowed within the modern territorial type, and those which

still stand—the “Freie Reichsstädte” of Hamburg, Lübeck, and Bremen, as well as the “semicanton” of

Basel Stadt—are in reality only province cities with extended self-governance within the constrains of

greater realms.

This form of state can today be seen as definitely expended. Even London’s city complex of 7

million inhabitants can no longer be thought of as an own state;91 this for reasons that will be shown

(see II.4.3.).

88 Possibly meaning the Swedish mile, 10 km, or the German Reichsmeile, 7.5 km.

89 In the most modern democracy, the capital has once again sunk in relative importance. In the system of the United

States, one deliberately avoids placing the government into the largest cities, so that Albany is the capital instead of

New York in the state of NY, Springfield instead of Chicago in IL, Harrisburg instead of Philadelphia in PA, and so on,

see Bryck, The Amer. Commonwealth, ed. 1903, II, 796. Brazil and Australia have placed their federal capitals in

sparsely populated areas at a legally determined distance from existing large cities, and South Africa has its government

in Pretoria, but its parliament in Cape Town, while Johannesburg is the business center and the most populated city.

(author)

90 “riksstäder”

91 Only as a self-governing “Reichsstadt” of the Hamburg type can London be imagined, that in the latest liberal

government’s “devolution plan” see The Great Powers III, 100. A similar solution has more than once in various

connections been conceived for the problem of Constantinople, see Kjellén, Politiska essayer (“Political Essays”), I,

79-. (author)

II.3. The “Life Property” of the State Under the Realm

We establish therefore as a first observation that the modern state presupposes a territory of both cities

and country. All states are land owners. Next observation is a difference between the state and private

land owners: a peasant may sell his farmstead, buy a new, and continue his existence there, but a state

cannot. The state cannot move. He has a fixed residence and home, unlike loitering nomadic hordes,

and this on a certain, once and for all determined, ground. He is fixed to his own soil, and dies if he

looses this hold. He stands under a “life property” of the territory. If we imagine that all the citizenry of

Sweden broke up with the king and the flag ahead and all of its movable property, and settled with

them beneath a different airspace—we could not bring Sweden with us; behind us the Swedish state

lies dead.

We fix here a property which the state has in common with vegetable communities, such as a

forest; the state cannot follow along by the air—he is like the forest bound by a certain soil from which

he draws nourishment, and under whose surface even his trees tie their roots together. Next, we see a

similarity with animal communities, in that the state’s single individuals have freedom of movement

and may serve his interest outside the territory as well. Sailing ships may bring valuables back home,

armies in enemy land may defend the homeland—Sweden is with its ships under the flag on the East

Asiatic line, just as Sweden once was with its sons by Breitenfeld and Poltava. In the same way ants

gather by the anthill and fight occasionally to its defense outside of it. Within the vegetable and animal

life there is a correspondence to the colonization through which a new state may emerge as an offshoot

of an older. All sub-human analogies explode ultimately to the state’s ability of spiritual connections.

Legations and consulates are its permanent sense-protrusion into other states, and all states may in

extraordinary cases come together in congresses through authorized envoys; likewise do modern

communication lines serve the states as force vessels through which the states may increase their

power. But in all of this, none are able to move from their space. It is the power source for each and all.

Every conflict between the threads is immediately reflected back. Each state gravitates at every

moment from the political community to its own center, which lies where it lies. All international

voyages show only ability of expansion, elasticity of the state, but no real ability to move. States may

not commit themselves: they are in soul and heart alone—like the human.

Nor does the state move itself when he goes on trails of conquest or colonization. A forest may

move from its space, but no state has in this way moved from its point of origin; at its height it has been

able to relocate its capital (from Moscow to Petersburg, from Kyoto to Tokyo). This outward expansion

is thus by its nature growth and not motion, whether it is satisfied with filling its natural space or

continues beyond it. This is especially apparent from this, that states after the expansionary powers are

exhausted withdraw to their own countries again. In this wise, Sweden’s state was gathered around the

great lakes of Scandinavia, expanded across the opposite shores of the Baltic, exchanged the

constitutional-legal tie to Finland for an international-legal bond with Norway, and resigned finally

back to its place in Scandinavia, with the natural border in Scania as only real gain; similarly, Denmark

has from its core in the islands (and Scania) grown over Holstein, over Skåneland, over Bohuslän and

Norway with its crown territories in the Ocean, to later lose one after the other and be satisfied with the

homeland; Spain with its American fates is a third example.

Every state has thus its once and for all fixed core country, from which it cannot separate itself

or alive be separated from. Inasmuch do all ships-of-state stand grounded and cannot be brought to

fleet! The state’s lifeform is the tree’s, which stands and falls on its place. This fact may occasionally

be seen in the legislations themselves, as they in legal form establish the state area: so in Belgium’s,

Holland’s, Prussia’s, as well as the German and the Swiss Confederation’s; the Swedish Instrument of

Government claims jurisdiction over “Svea rike and thus underlying countries,”—other constitutions

are silent, but their general presumptions are naturally the same.

This condition is connected to the state territory’s integrity. It is written in our Instrument of

Government §78: “no part of the realm may therefrom be be separated,”92 and §45 applies the axiom by

forbidding royal duchies and life estates any more than in the name. This quality of the land belongs

also to the consciousness of late-matured peoples, just as it presupposes a long-lasting link between

country and state. We pity unjustly the gullible savages who sell great tracks of land for little pearls and

fabrics, as they are not worth any more to them (Ratzel); yet still the land exchanges of the middle ages

and the “Arrondierund”93 principle bear witness of small concern for territory as the basis of a state.

Our time has become all the more sensitive in this aspect. It is a question of whether the popular mind

reacted sharper against the loss of Grisbådarna than that of the union94: the loss of Swedish power that

rested in the union seemed easier for us to bear, as it did not affect the territory. Similarly it seems that

the underwater skerries, which are only inhabited by lobsters, had been dearer to us than that half-

million of Swedes which has emigrated forever, to judge from how we never took any action to

constrain the emigration flows until the very latest times. Ratzel makes the same remark with respect to

Germans: how different would they not have felt the loss of a few thousand square kilometers than of

100,000 emigrants! This can in part be explained by that humans may be replaced by other humans—

the state, after all, sees every year a mass of its citizens vanish and others come to be through natural

rotation; they, sooner than the solid ground, have the quality of loose property. But the fact remains.

Nothing can more clearly show the modern state’s consciously intimate connection to the soil than how

he may bear loss of people easier than loss of land.

II.3.1. The Organic Interpretation: the Body of the State

In this way, the state shows itself in stronger solidarity with the land than with the people. May we

understand this better? Everything becomes clear with a single word: the realm is the body of the state.

As all analogies, this is meant to shed light before the eyes, not shades around them. The realm is no

property like the farmer’s own land; it belongs to the state’s personhood. It is the state itself, from a

perspective. “Of earth you came,” says the Christian ritual of the individual when his body is to be

returned to the earth, and the modern anthropogeography seconds this by regarding the human as “a

piece of highly evolved soil”; in its own sense, this diagnosis also fits the largest form of human

community. Even a state is “made of earth”; even he is, seen from an aspect, a developed surface of the

Earth.

92 “ej må någon del af riket kunna därifrån söndras”

93 arrondering, land delimitation

94 Marine territory which was contested between Sweden and Norway at the time of the union’s dissolution in 1909.

International court ruled that the waters belong to Sweden.

It is Ratzel’s view which we recognize here. It has already been noted (see I.3.) that this view

has not yet become a common possession even within the science. A great step toward its breakthrough

should be taken through Jellinek, who otherwise stands against the organic state-teaching. He labels as

a misguided notion Seydel’s formulation of the realm as the object of the state; he himself sees in the

realm a moment which partakes in the state’s subject, and considers it one of the political science’s

greatest conquests,

that the state’s relationship to its realm has the character of personal right, rather

than jus in re, real right. An intrusion into the territory is therefore—J. cites here with agreement

Preuss95—an intrusion against the state itself, not against any of its occupations; a transgression against

a person, not against property. Of course, such formulations have no definitive evidence, and the whole

understanding is at its root no more than a working hypothesis. But it will now demonstrate its

truthfulness through that clarity which therefrom radiates over a multitude of the state-life’s

phenomena.

II.3.2. International-Legal Consequences

First of all comes the positive international-legal corollary that all persons located within the country

are beholden to the power of the state whether they are foreigners or subjects, for the state must rule

over its own body. Therefore it was Japan’s first call after the political renaissance to withdraw itself

from the trade treaties of the 1850s, which excempted foreigners from its legal power, and the new

Turkey has in the same spirit hurried to renounce the “capitulations.” Further follows is the state’s right

to take all measures for its own safety in its own region, and its inconvenience when it must surrender

any aspect of this right; thereof Russia’s reaction (1908 in diplomacy, 1916 in action) against the

obligation, conceded by treaty in 1856, which requires it not to fortify Åland, and similarly

Montenegro’s against the Berlin Treaty’s article 29, which forbids the transformation of Antivaris into a

military harbor.

At the same time it follows negatively from our thesis that no state may exercise a prolonged

dominion over a foreign state’s territory; for a body cannot serve two masters. Here too there are more

apparent than true exceptions in the modern occupations, condominiums, and protectorates of various

kinds and degrees, not to mention state-union’s double dominion. Occupations slide regularly to

sovereignty (Austria-Hungary over Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, Japan over Korea in 1910, England

over Egypt in 1914), condominiums end just as regularly in pure change of ownership or resolution of

other sort (Prussia-Austria over Schleswig-Holstein in 1866, Germany-U.S.A. over Samoa 1889-1899,

only the provision on the Hebrides lives on between France-England since 1887 still lives on96), and the

federation’s struggle with the member-state is fundamentally little worse than the state’s with its

municipalities. All these are transitory forms, whereon the political world, no less rich than other

spheres of life, and the real detractions from the principle confirm their anomaly merely through the

fact that such points always invoke concern: it is as if they form open wounds in the state-system

concerned.

95 Preuss, Gemeinde. Staat, Reich als Gebietskörperschaften, 1889, p. 394, compare Jellinek, pp. 398, 395, 404. That

Jellinek has not gotten to the bottom of this view shows itself, for example, on p. 176, where the realm (Reich) is

portrayed as “ein den Menschen anklebendes Element” (“an element which binds humans”). (author)

96 A proposal to this solution for the current Polish question proposed by Grabowsky (Die Polnische Frage, 1916), is on

this basis to be view as already stillborn. (author)

Seen from the same point of view, the state’s mission to develop its country’s supportive sources

and natural resources holds the same compulsive power as that which invites a human to care of her

health. The old liberal view that the state ought to leave the land97 to the unrestrained judgment of the

individuals implies therefore that the state shall leave duties to its own personhood unfulfilled. Thereof

follows in the length nothing good; our Norrland question is like America’s trust formations not

incidental—it is footed in a lack of understanding of the connection between state and country. But the

correct understanding continues to make itself deeply relevant. It can be seen that this occurs when the

state through external challenges loses parts of its country. This is, according to our view, not to be

equated with the loss of property, but with a surgical incision; thus what is lost is not merely the

surgically removed area, but also a degree of power. Where the surgery goes too deep, or where no real

vital power is found, there no change is noted: we saw little in Persia following 1907. But where there

is still health, there it shows in an instinctive feeling of the need to recover the lost through an intensive

inner development.

It is this feeling which Tegnér has given the formula to “within Sweden’s border reconquer

Finland”98. The poet’s intuition grasps here a deep, purely geopolitical truth; we may call it the law of

convalescence99. It is this which drove the people of Holland after 1830 to at the bottoms of lakes and

seas100 reconquer Belgium, it drove the people of Denmark to after 1864 in sands of wastelands101

reclaim Schleswig; and as we in current times see a growing drift toward development in our own

country, a growing interest in our natural resources as well, with a certain boldness and enthusiasm in

the communication politics, which greatly breaks against a long period of laziness, so is this too not a

coincidence, but the law convalescence which invites us to within mountains and swamps and

waterfalls and communication lines reconquer the union. Geopolitics give here a scientific example of

the the tale of Anteus, the giant who regained power by touching mother earth.

II.3.3. Practical-Political Consequences

But if territory shall posses this healing power, then it cannot be a piece of dead land. A body is an

organism, and a mature realm is the same. This appears especially, as Ratzel has proposed, in the

political value of different parts of a country. There are regions that may be lost without danger, and

there are others whose loss the state may not survive. Even the state bodies have their Achille’s heels

and their hearts. Such vital parts are primarily the capitals and the great pulsing veins of

communication. Sweden, which 300 years ago had to come out with “Älvsborg’s ransom”102 to retain

its only harbor by the western sea, shall nowadays count to these parts the entirety of Bohuslän, it’s

only directly open window to the world seas; were a sea route opened to Vänern, Uddevalla would be

of greater importance than Gothenburg.103 What the Göta älv’s mouth is and more, that is what

97 See ft. 30: The author uses the same word for country and land.

98 “inom Sveriges gräns eröfra Finland åter”—from “Svea” (1811), poem by Esaias Tegnér (1782-1846).

99 rekonvalescensens lag

100 Figure of speech, literal translation.

101 Likewise.

102 Älvsborgs lösen—ransoms paid by Sweden to Denmark to regain the Älvsborg fortification near Gothenburg in 1570

and 1613.

103 Gothenburg, the second largest city in Sweden, is positioned at the mouth of Göta älv, which connects Vänern, the

largest lake in Sweden and in Europe outside Russia, to the sea. Uddevalla is positioned further north and closer to the

Schelde’s mouth is to Belgium: Holland may choke Antwerp by closing this port, and has done so prior

to the French revolution as well as after the loss of Belgium in 1830; it became a task for the new state

to at least see the toll eliminated, as happened in 1863, followed by the great rise of Antwerp; but the

Vliessing question of 1911 bore witness of a remaining sensitivity on this point. Belgrade was not only

the capital of Serbia, but also its Danubian port, surrogate for sea access; thereof its indispensability—

the Serbian state was in solidarity with Belgrade and was lost with it. When Chile in 1884 extended its

border between Bolivia and the sea, this foe was paralyzed for the future, as the coast was its vital part.

The realms’ organic nature is thus never more clear

than in war. War is as an experimental field

for the geopolitics, as for all politics, and the general staffs ought to be scientific academies no less in

this branch of the political science104. It is to them that it comes to determine the campaign plans with

respect to the enemy land’s greater or lesser value within the enemy state’s political organization; they

must therefore study them exactly from this point of view. Modern war has as its goal to break the

opponent’s will; the most radical measure therewith is to take the entire realm, for that is the same as to

deprive him control of his own body; thus France was itself captured in 1871, and could not escape

Germany’s arms before conceding its willpower; similarly Belgium in 1914, Serbia and Montenegro in

1915. This is a modern war all the way to the end; but one may exhaust and tire the enemy, so that he

gives up before reaching that point, one may weaken him as people by killing or capturing the army, as

household by tapping sources of wealth, as realm by occupying parts thereof. On these two latter areas,

geopolitics serves the art of war by indicating the weak parts. It was a true geopolitical instinct, which

drove Gustaf Adolf to seek the Emperor in the inherited countries and similarly Napoleon to seek the

capital after these were developed into true centers during absolutism. Japan’s plan to occupy the

imperial canal of China in 1895 and thus disconnect the capitals of the realm, after Japan first paralyzed

it by taking the outworks and fleet, bears witness of deep geopolitical instinct too; a plan which was

halted by the conclusion of the war. A similar attack on the Göta Canal, though, would hardly affect

Sweden, while a victorious strike against Stockholm by a sea-mastering Russia would take upper

Norrland from our hands more certainly than an occupation in place.

So are state territories linked together in organic connection as bodies with hearts and lungs and

less noble parts. If science and practical politics have been late to open their eyes for this, this depends

also on the fact that reality has not been so clear before as now. The realms’ organic property is

developed more and more in joint life with the same people and the same state power. With every

generation, which after finished work above the native soil is embedded into the same, the people’s

feeling of solidarity grows toward the country as its place of play, field of work, and graveyard at the

same time as its nourishing field and its secure home. To the people’s spontaneous work to develop and

organize the country, that of the state-power is at a growing scale attached: by organized local

administration, by “public works” of various kinds. The longer the cohabitation between them has

lasted and the higher consequentially the culture has been driven, the more natural and necessary is the

organic view on the territory which we here present. The people grows not from its country, it grows

into it. How differently rooted are not the contemporary Englishmen than the Brittons who once

lake.

104 Today, political science (Statsvetenskap) is one of two civilian undergraduate programs (along with military history)

offered by the Swedish Defense Academy (Försvarshögskolan).

trampled the grounds of the Midlands and Lancashire with no clue of their treasuries of stone coal and

iron! Practical politics must therefore keep an eye open for the degree of this organ-development. Here

is where Napoleon erred, when he thought to in Moscow hit Russia’s heart; it was a false generalization

of his basic idea of warfare, as Russia had yet no heart in the same sense as the Western realms.

II.4. The Geographical Individuality

But there remains one thing to show in order to strengthen the analogy between a state’s territory and a

body, and that is to show the state-regions’ independent distinction from one another. An organic entity

is, after all, a thing complete in itself, separable from others. It is likely this presupposition which

causes the most resistance against the organic interpretation in the general consensus. In reality it is

here that it has its most glaring confirmation.

It gives us, namely, clarity over the one—so to say, the inner—aspect of the great leitmotif

throughout history which has invoked the struggle for space. What we see there is namely at the

foundation nothing other than the states’ desire to become organic areas. They seek geographical

individuals to connect with, in order to by this connection sublimate their territories to the natural.

To discover this connection, the science must first come to clarity in the question of the concept

of a “geographical individual,” which occurred through Karl Ritter in 1817105. A steadily growing

observation in this direction has found that this term is constituted by two determinants: outwardly by

natural borders106, inwardly by harmonic connection in a natural territory107. In both directions, the law

of geographical individualization been all the more powerfully active in the lives of states.

II.4.1. Natural Borders, Different Types

Natural delimitation is a peripheral property of the realm, through which its separation from other states

is marked more strongly or more weakly.108 This is best accomplished by the sea, and the ideal realm is

from this point of view the island realm. No states appear more clearly as individuals than the domains

of England and Japan, while the purely continental realms (Switzerland, Serbia, the Boer republics in

the latter half of the 19th century, Paraguay, Bolivia after 1884) stand furthest from the ideal. Therefore

the “longing for the sea” is a political motive of the first order for all states of excessively continental

nature, as in Serbia’s and to an even greater degree Russia’s history in latter times has fully indicated.

Where states share a common land border, there the principle demands that the type of border

entails a difficulty of interaction, for better or worse, between the realms. Italy between the Alps and

the sea, India with the Himalayas and Hindu Kush on the land side come in this aspect close to the

insular realms; the Andes give Chile and Argentina an excellent border, and Romania appears naturally

anchored by the Transylvanian mountains. In older times, one would for this purpose even erect

105 Hözel. “Das geograph. Individuum bei Karl Ritter und seine Bedeutung für den Begriff des Naturgebietes und der

Naturgrenze” (“The Geographical Individual of Karl Ritter and its meaning for the concept of the natural territory and

the natural borders”), 1896, pp. 380- [see https://www.jstor.org/stable/27803055]. Cf. Schöne, Polit. Geographie, 1911,

p. 14-15. (author)

106 naturliga gränser

107 naturgebit

108 Hözel’s definition, op. Cit. p. 444, goes deepest: “eine Linie, an welche der lokale Charakter der in einem

individualisierten Raume vereinigten Realiteten erlöscht, bez. von einem anderen abgelöst wird” (“A line along which

the local character of an individualized space dissolves the united realities, or separates one from another”). (author)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/27803055

artificial barriers, such as the Chinese wall against the Mongols of the desert, the roman limes in

Southern Germany and Trajan’s wall in Dobruja, Dannevirke in Schleswig. It must always be be

established, though, that we here deal only with relative circ*mstances. No one can say how tall a

mountain must be to serve as a good border mountain. It depends to a significant degree on the

convenience of its passageways. It depends no less on how tall109 the people are who sit on either side:

a greater people may observe heights which are completely closed to the lesser—which should be kept

in mind when one asks why Kölen can remain a national border, but not the Apennines and not the

Urals or Appalachians or even the Rocky Mountains110. On the other hand

an internal mountain may

become a hazard by the attraction that it presents to a neighbor, as the Carpathians for Austria-Hungary

in the World War.111 And besides, it may always be observed that the mountains’ different inclinations

give them different values as borders for both opposing entities; thus the Ore Mountain and Vosges

Mountain borders are more beneficial to the neighbors than to Germany.

By the same fundamental principle—that the border ought to emphasize the realms’ separation

on either side and prevent them from entering one another—it follows that well-trafficked rivers hardly

dedicate themselves to this political task. Therefore we find river borders, as a rule, only at lower stages

of state-development, or remnants therefrom which mark fragile parts of the state system: so in

northern Scandinavia and in by the lower Danube, so in South Africa, where politics have already

broken them, and most of all in South America, which is also a beloved country of border frictions, a

state-system that has not yet “settled.” The water border contrasts therefore between river and sea;

while the absolute sea border, that is, the insular type, is the best, so is the mesopotamic type, where the

realm is bounded on all sides by river arms, to be noted as particularly poor. We find it strongly

expressed in Paraguay and the former Boer states, more moderately in Romania (which has the

mountains for support on one side).

Here it should not be left unnoticed, though, that the World War has to some extent strengthened

the merit of rivers as borders. Since the war has developed into a typical position war with trenches,

one could have imagined the trenches as a lasting institution also in peace112: an artificial border as that

of the old Roman Empire, but with a trench instead of a wall! Now the rivers are in a certain sense

natural trenches. This significance for defense (as for customs protection) has not escaped scientists,

but it has been brought to increased light by the experiences of the World War, particularly from the

eastern front, where the war has had a determined habit of staggering by even smaller river lines (such

as Bsura, Ravka, Styr, Strypa, Stochod). It is not impossible that this experience shall bear fruit in the

coming peace to the rehabilitation of rivers as borders.113

Rivers always have a precedence in their sharply marked lines. This is the question in which we

find lacking deserts, wetlands, and forests; which, though, by their relative sterility are well fit for the

109 Exact meaning of this passage is unclear.

110 Cf. Political Essays (Politiska essayer), III, p. 151. (author)

111 The Carpathians’ character as a natural border is shown in that they were the cliff against which the movement of

Russia’s armies subsided, but also in that Russia’s repeated campaigns have reached all the way until them. The current

border grants Austria-Hungary Galicia for a “glacis” (Sieger), but this interest to one party cannot be recognized to have

objective value. (author)

112 See Fr. Naumann, Mitteleuropa, 1915, p. 7. (author)

113 See “Skyttegrafven som institution” (“The Trench as Institution”) in Nya Dagt. Allehanda 4/3 1916. (author)

true purpose of the border. They lead the thought back to the most primitive form of border, the zone:

long ago, in wild lands, swept clean by manhunts, as by the Matabele tribe and the Mahdins still in the

19th century—in the newest times revived among the cultured peoples in international-legal form, such

as the 3-mile long “neutral zone” along the southernmost part of the realm border between Sweden and

Norway after the divorce of 1905.

Before we leave this aspect of the subject, let a reservation be made in the other direction. The

good border is an obstruction of travel, but it may not be absolute and exclusive. The snail shell is not

an ideal for the house of the state. What it comes to is the right middle line between enclosure and

communication; a wall, well tall enough to protect from harmful pressure, not so tall as to completely

close all views and prevent a sound interaction between states.114 The sea’s precedence as a natural

border must be recognized as a disadvantage if it isolates to a certain degree, as in the case of New

Zealand. The harmonic equilibrium stands here as the ideal, not the pure extreme.

II.4.2. The Natural Territory and Its Types

We now turn the view from the periphery to the center—from the natural borders, which only constitute

the frame, to the enframed territory. To the organic separation from the outside must come a similarly

organic inner connection if one is to seriously speak of individuality. The pursuit of this connection

happens on its own historical line, and has distinguished several different types before it at all was

framed in connection with the necessity of natural delimitation.

The oldest form of a natural area is the potamic115, with its roots in ancient realm-formations by

Tigris and Euphrates and by the Nile. There, the type was developed no further than the stage of a

river-mouth realm, in which form it may still be found in places on the map (for example, Cochinchina,

Nigeria, Portugl, Netherlands). As a more complete form it is found in the “Danubian monarchy” and

“Congo state,” which to a significant extent embrace the entire area of a dominant river (lesser

examples in the Manam-realm of Siam, Orinoco-realm in Venezuela, Essequibo-realm in Brit.

Guyana). In this form we can therefore not fail to recognize vital power. In actuality there is a great

degree of solidarity—particularly in communication and construction—within a region drained in a

common system, even if one does not with Agardh (1853) see in these “primary valleys” and “primary

hillsides” the map’s only and purely natural provinces.116 Fully realized, this type satisfies also the

peripheral requirement, as the water-separator between different river zones as a rule is a qualified

border type. In reality, the system often lacks completeness, particularly in the Danubian monarchy,

whose decisive weakness is precisely that it lacks all of the sources of the river. But this incompleteness

invokes also regularly a political pressure in the direction of the missing parts, that is, from the mouth

114 Lyde, “Types of Polit. Frontiers in Europe” (Geogr. Journal, febr. 1915) recasts the perspective completely and

motivates the Rhine border precisely for the reason that communication there gravitates in both directions: an

interpretation that evoked opposition at the actual meeting, see pp. 128, 135-36, 144.—For a special case, namely at the

meeting point of natural and cultured peoples, Junghans has already (“Der Fluss in seiner Bedeutung als Grenze”) with

reason argued for the superiority of the river border over all other border types. (author)

115 The expression is Kapp’s. (Vergleichende Erdkunde, 1868), although with a somewhat different color, see Sieger,

“Staatsgrenzen und Stromgebiete,” Sonderabdruck aus der D. Rundschau der Geographie, 1913-14, p. 3 n. 1. One

could also have said the “fluvio-central,” as opposed to the “fluvioperipheral,” or “circumfluvial” against

“circummarine.” (author)

116 See Kjéllen, Introduction to Sweden’s Geography (Sveriges geografi), 1900, p. 21. (author)

to the source and vice versa, all according to the balance of power. It was this pressure to which Bosnia

fell victim in 1908 (1878) and Serbia in 1915: they were spread limbs in the Danubian basin, which

then entered the Danubian realm.

An even larger role than the potamic or the circumfluvial realm type has been played by the

circummarine type. Here, unity is sought not in a common drainage area, but in open water with its

intimate connection routes; that is, a pure-bred exemplification of the communication perspective. It

catches the eye that this type is more one-sided and superficial than the former. Nonetheless, some of

history’s proudest pages are written

in its sign, those of the Roman Mediterranean dominion, of

Sweden’s Baltic dominion, and—proudest of them all—of England’s dominion in the Indian Ocean.

Since England itself earned its insular type (by the union with Scotland 300 years ago), it has for the

most part of its reign sought this more primitive form. As a realm type it is all the more impressive,

built entirely from foreign building stones as it is, far from the owner’s own house. One may denote it

as an incredible attempt by a state to move out of its own space, an attempt that in the length must

overstrain its forces; as it now stands, it has already in its cornerstone of Egypt created an Achille’s

heel, or a “vital point” (see II.3.3.), of the first order.

In principle, this state type does not concern itself with the natural borders: it lives exclusively

by the centripetal force that is supposed to flow from its marine medium. But even if the border

problem may in all directions be happily solved—and also without overextension in England’s case—

this type hardly seems to belong to the future, as the land in terms of communications has begun to

catch on to the sea’s advantage (Svensén); this development tends to restore to the sea that original and

natural purpose of a border. The modern states should also in the length not prefer such gaps in their

population as the type induces. It is only in simpler state-systems with weak concentric pressure where

such realm-forms may develop and survive.

Although the formed-out circummarine realm type does not appear to fit into a modern state

system, there will always remain a political tendency in which it can be said to have its root: the

demand for an anti-country117, fundamentally defensive, to counteract the threat of a greater power on

the other shore, that is, the desire for a “political bridgehead” (Arldt) or a pre-stage before the natural

stage118. We see fresh workings of the law now in Italy’s aspirations for Tripoli in 1911 and Albania in

1915, just as in Japans reservation for Fokien vis-a-vis Formosa. Japan’s newest expansion may as a

whole seem as an attempt to revive the circummarine type around the Sea of Japan; but this is only a

temporary appearance—the true direction of expansion lies more to the south.

For now, the circummarine tendency rests also on a real principle, that the closed realm-form is

stronger than the splintered one by its facilitation of communication and defense. Our days’ great

politics has to depth and quantity been directed by this motive, to create interconnected colonial

complexes in place of the separate colonies. One has denoted this contrast as Russian and English. But

England too nowadays strives consciously to build bridges between the bridgestones of its dominions;

this within the frame of the thought of the Indian Ocean. From this thought, therefore, a political

117 motland

118 Arldt, “Naturliche Grenzen und staatliche ‘Brückenköpfe’” in Zeitschr. für Politik, 1916, pp. 543-. The author

generalizes this drift to a world-historical motif and counts to it not only staging beyond the sea, but also “glacis”

beyond a natural border in land context, such as Congress Poland for Russia’s end in the Rokitno wetlands, p. 551.

(author)

pressure was exerted toward intermediate, not yet politically acquired countries, such as Mesopotamia

and Arabia, and because Germany’s Levantine program (just as its equatorial) meant an opposite

pressure on the same points, so did the World War gain one of its most powerful stimulations in this

geopolitical conflict. The circummarine realm type can also be derived from a process in which the law

of the anti-country is the first and the law of the closed possession the second moment; there is no

reason to expect a decline in the power of these motives each on their own; even if they together would

find it more difficult to in interaction construct dominions with the sea for a central point.

II.4.3. Solution to the Problem of the Realm

With the conduction of these history’s own experiments we may now establish two general results as a

solution to the problem of the realm itself. One the one hand, a correspondence is required between the

natural boundary's outer and the natural area’s inner advantages, which are historically formed along

separate lines; only when one has accomplished the one without losing the other does one reach the

goal. One the other hand, these factors may not be found lacking too much, so that every natural border

is perceived to be natural and every geographical interrelation is perceived as a natural territory. In both

cases more inner and deeper qualities are required. We have fixed them as far as borders are concerned;

there remains a similar remark to be made on the territory.

It catches the eyes then, that it is not the simplex which gives the natural territory its content,

but the harmonic; not the formal connection by the river or sea, or even a single desert, or even a fertile

plain, but a harmonic completion and measured proportion of productive natural types: field, meadow,

forest, mountain, and water. Here too moderation is the ideal, not the extreme. hom*ogeneity is a

weakness, for it results in a uniform production with thereof following foreign dependence and

increased risk119. It is therefore the production perspective which is dominant here. One expects of a

natural territory that it shall satisfy the people’s consumption needs in separate directions. A realm

must, for the sake of its economic sovereignty (which in its own order is a prerequisite for political

sovereignty), just as a person to a certain degree ought to, “be sufficient for himself.”

Herein lies the doom of the city-state type (as London, see II.2.). It is the great law of autarky

that we are concerned with here: the realm must be a natural territory which prepares for reasonable

autarky. It is the real determinant of the geographical individuality within. Here lies also the direct

bridge between geopolitics, which treats the general circ*mstances of the realms, and economic

politics, which treats autarky’s factual development and methods within the realm households.

II.4.4. Impact of the State upon the Realm

The multitude of political aspirations which follow from the law of autarky belong thus to the chapter

on the economic politics (see IV.1.1.). Here already, though, may the remark find place that the state

itself may contribute to its autarky. That is not simply gifted to it by the realm; it has in its power the

ability to, by a certain degree, reshape the realm, so that it better suits this demand. Autarky lies only

latently in the soil and must be extracted by labor; powerful and systematic work on the soil, aimed at

not only developing its advantage, but also to complete for what it lacks, means a powerful contribution

119 C.f. the concept of import-substitution industrialization.

to the realm’s individuality. The state is thus able to make its realm more natural than it fundamentally

is.

Also the borders’ weakness may by people and state be to some part overcome, and this even

without artificial means such as Chinese walls or modern trenches. Nature does not at all have good

border types in such variety that they may always be available at hand for political shifts. The gaps are

filled by the bonds of historical cohabitation, which let the borders grow in the popular consciousness,

so to speak as spiritual pathways. Weak borders may also be strengthened by well-suited

communication politics with respect to those living along the border; thereof the idea to make the

Swedish inland line in the southern part of the country into a distance rail along the border and

therefore block the natural draw to the neighboring country. Overall the communication problem in the

“cycle of intercourses” is of central significance to the question of the realms’ inner and outer

III.7. Special Problems........................................................................................................................75

III.7.1. Of the Degree and Type of Nationality...............................................................................75

III.7.2. Of the Physical Replacement Cycle...................................................................................76

III.7.3. Of the Mathematical Relationship Between Realm and People.........................................77

III.8. Conclusion, Ethnopolitics..........................................................................................................78

IV. The State As Household, Society, and Regiment: Economic Politics—Sociopolitics—Regimental

Politics......................................................................................................................................................79

IV.1. Concepts of the Household and Various Types..........................................................................79

IV.1.1. Concept and Practice of Autarky........................................................................................81

IV.1.2. Self-Preservation of the State in Economic Area................................................................84

IV.2. Concepts of Society and Successive Types................................................................................85

IV.2.1. Relationship to Economic Politics......................................................................................86

IV.2.2. Types of Societies...............................................................................................................87

IV.2.3. Natural Society and Sociality..............................................................................................89

IV.2.4. Purpose of the State in the Social Conflict.........................................................................90

IV.3. Concepts of the Regiment...........................................................................................................91

IV.3.1. Its Roots in the Soil.............................................................................................................92

IV.3.2. The Personhood Demand: Universal Suffrage....................................................................93

IV.3.3. Natural Representation........................................................................................................94

IV.3.4. Loyalty and Thereto Related State-Purposes......................................................................96

IV.3.5. Spirit of the Time and National Spirit in the Regiment......................................................97

V. The State Under the Law of Life.......................................................................................................100

V.1. Perishability of the State............................................................................................................100

V.2. The Birth of the State.................................................................................................................100

V.2.1. Primary and Secondary Process.........................................................................................100

V.2.2. Reception into the State Collective....................................................................................102

V.3. The Death of the State................................................................................................................104

V.3.1. Psychological Dissolution of the Nationality (Poland)......................................................104

V.3.2. Physical Undermining of the Nation (Rome).....................................................................106

V.3.3. Necessity of the Death........................................................................................................107

V.4. Necessity and Freedom within the State-Life............................................................................107

V.4.1. International Implications..................................................................................................108

V.4.2. On Individual Duty Toward the State.................................................................................109

Conclusion: On the Purpose of the State................................................................................................111

Appendix: Politics As Science...............................................................................................................114

PONTUS FAHLBECK

The Predecessor

With Gratitude

and Affection

Preface

This book is, to date, my primary work, which ties together my separate pieces on various subjects in

theoretical and practical politics. In its fundamental idea, the varied studies come together as creeks and

tributaries into one main river and gain unity as a single, thorough view of the state. Therewith it

denotes a significant step toward that aim which I, as a scientist, strive for: a system for the

comprehension of politics.

The first, small, step on this way is contained in a news item on “Politics as Science,” published

in the beginning of 1901; attached here in the appendix. Nearest followed, as a sort of practical

experiment, the studies of the state’s greatest positive manifestations, which were summarized in my

work on The Great Powers1, first edition completed in 1905; the preface thereto contains already in

nuce the entirety of our new political doctrine. Thereon the theoretical problem was taken up for direct

treatment through public popular-scientific lectures at the University of Gothenburg, autumn semester

of 1908, and the title selected for this sequence was: “The State as a Lifeform: Contours for an

Empirical Political Science.”

New stages of this theoretical and system-building project were contained in the The Great

Powers’ second edition of 1911-1913 (in particular, the preface to part IV), later in In Critique of the

Great Powers2 (1913, in Festschrift to Hugo Geber), Contemporary Great Powers3 (1914), and

Political Problems of the World War4 (1915), until its principles were finally formulated in the lecture

on “The Object of the Political Science,”5 with which I entered the Skyttean professorship6 at the

University of Uppsala in May 1916. This lecture (since then published in Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift) is

now included as an introductory and first chapter of this book. But even this, much like the rest of the

present work, rests in its root on lectures of 1908, which denote my definitive break from the juridical

view of the state. Though all parts may be have been revised and several times deepened, these lectures

lay thus as foundation for the publication which now, while retaining the title, seeks greater generality.

This origin is presented here also to, in some manner, explain the occasionally cursive form in

which the investigation is presented. I do not hide from myself the fact that it does not truly represent

what one usually means by the expression of a handbook: rather, it meets the criteria for what we in

school called a “reading book,” as opposed to a textbook or a handbook. If I have carelessly (in

accordance with the publisher’s wishes) now let the presentation in its original, independent form be

included in a series of Political Handbooks, then I seek the justification of this in the fundamental

thought’s multifaceted and consequential execution, from the point of view that it is the core’s firmness

more than the shell’s which constitutes the essence of a scientific textbook.

If this point of view may be seen as applicable here, then perhaps the freer form may be of

service to another purpose, which no less than the scientific is intended by the present book, as with my

1 Stormakterna

2 Till kritiken af Stormakterna

3 Samtidens stormakter

4 Världskrigets politiska problem

interconnections.

The question of the border is, besides, always to some degree a question of the purely political

power relation between the sides. A strong state such as Germany bears without difficulty bad borders,

which for a weak state such as Turkey became fatal. The border is thus stabilized not only by its own

natural qualities, but foremostly by the entire state’s power development, and therebehind by the

balance of the entire state-system. That strong states do not stop at the natural border, but seek

themselves “bridgeheads” and “glacis” there beyond, Arldt has with justice shown120. But if power

wanes within a member of the system, then this indicates a weakened counterweight at this point,

which means an increased pressure on it from the other side; first then must the border show its

suitability as a natural one against the growing stress—and the bad border seems now an open, or half-

open, door to a collapsing house.

II.5. Perishability of the State and Immortality of the Realm

It is an intrinsic connection in constant flux between realm, people, and state power which thus meets

our afterthought. This guaranteed mutuality between the separate elements of the state shall also aid us

in overcoming a theoretical difficulty, which at first may seem concerning. If the territory is a body—

will anyone object—have we not then also accepted a scheme in which the body is less transient than

the soul? Or does not the country stay even as the state vanishes? And may it not in its time serve as a

body to new states? The Mediterranean countries have seen such examples. It is clear here that we

stand at the limit of our analogy. It is extended to the outermost extreme. But we will see that it is not

entirely lacking here either. The difference between states and other organisms at this point is not even

as great as it may seem, namely, if we take the guarantee of mutuality in account. A glance at the given

playing field, the Mediterranean region, will enlighten us thereon.

It is in reality not the same country that lies now in the valley of Guadalquivir, or around Tigris-

Euphrates, or even the fever coasts of Italy as were in the times when Moors, Babylonians, and old

Romans so successfully fought the natural drought there. The new peoples and states have loosened in

their struggle, allowed the irrigation structures to decline and thereof left the country defenseless

120 Op. cit. p. 516. It is, though, a gross exaggeration to, as Arldt, on this basis declare the natural border to be an empty

buzzword.—The “glacis” buzzword is used in particular by Curzon, on England’s sphere’s of interest beyond the

natural borders of India; cf. Also p. 55 n. 2. (author)

against the elements. The result has been new countries on the same part of soil. So does the country

partake, more or less, in the fate of the state. Nature, fundamentally, offers only the frame and the raw

resource; it is up to the people to fill and form—or, in one word, organize—it. Without organization

collapses also the realm, following the state. I can therefore not subscribe to Jellinek’s thesis that the

realm is at once both the state’s dead and immortal element; I rather see there a living and mortal entity.

What is dead and immortal is, so to speak, the raw soil.121 Worked by a people under the protection of a

state, it gains something of the people’s and the state’s perishability; at the same time, it returns to the

state an element of its initial imperishability in and through the continuity of its nature and the

psychological effect thereof on the the people.

II.6. The Problem of Private Property

We have now followed the organic understanding of the realm from different aspects and have found its

nature to grow all the clearer with the passage of time and growth of culture, until the realm finally

stands as a part of the state’s personality, its body, coloring the state with certain qualities and on the

other hand receiving influence from the state. A remark on this general chapter stands out once again to

us concerning one of the most significant political problems, which by this understanding receives its

clear solution. It is the problem of the individuals’ right to parts of the state’s territory, that is, the

problem of the individual landowner. We know already (see I.1.2.) that the state in its domains and

forests, and so on, has immediate interests in the realm; in what relationship does the rest of the realm’s

soil stand hereto?

According to Heinrich Schurtz (1900), the “dead are the first and undisputed and entirely

personal landowners,” to the extent that no one even dared to approach the burial grounds122. Nowadays

the dead in our cemeteries cannot even prevent the gravekeeper from harvesting the grass atop of their

own graves. It is the living’s work on the soil, primarily the generations’ sequential labor to increase its

value, which constitutes the moral foundation of the ownership right.. Thus, speaks Ratzel, “the

landowner shares the ground with the state, and is therewith closer bound to the state than is the

merchant.”123 The question is now whether he herewith has rights against the state as an equally

privileged part. Feudalism believed so, and we see the same view return in the historical liberalism.

There is a pure and clear echo still in the debate in our parliament’s Second Chamber on the 2nd of May,

1907, concerning Norrland’s ore fields, where the leading politician of liberalism, Karl Staaff, equated

the relationship between the Kiruna company and the Swedish state to the relationship between two

neighbors124. This interpretation was opposed to the sharpest from as much the socialist direction as by

the right. From our organic perspective, the case is absolutely clear. If the land is the state’s body and

and the state a unity, then it may not tolerate claims toward dissolution from the inside any more than

incisions from the outside. The property right is therefore only to be seen as delegated on behalf of the

state with a quiet reservation that this does not contribute to the state’s destruction; if so occurs, then

121 “Von menschlichen Subjekten ganz losgelöst gibt es kein Gebiet, sondern nur Teile der Erdoberfläche” (“Separate from

human subjects, there is no territory, but only parts of the Earth’s surface”), says Jellinek himself, p. 176; cf. p.78.

(author)

122 Quoted by Ratzel, p. 50., cf. His entire ch. III, “Besitz und Herrschaft.” (author)

123 Ambiguous—may also be read as “closer to the state than to the merchant.”

124 A. K’s protocol, pp. 39, 46-47, 51. (author)

the state’s right to “reduction” is made clear by history. Our latest Norrland- and forest legislations bear

witness that this understanding is returning to our practical politics, likewise our modern concept of

“neglect”125 (the law of “review”126 of certain farms in 1909) points back to the times of Gustaf Vasa.

We cannot admit any “states within states” with privileges against the state to its certain harm.

The standpoint of liberalism depends here on a purely mechanistic, by science defeated

perspective. It was not two neighbors who were exchanging Kiruna wares between themselves: one of

the parties was Sweden itself. Theoretically, that problem is solved. But if the science, therefore, in

principle, vindicates socialism in this aspect, it has not given a judgment in the question of practical

politics on the degree to which the state ought to interfere with its right of superownership127. This

question cannot at all be solved by scientific methods. It is clear that one may theoretically celebrate

the thesis that all right of ownership is fundamentally a right of occupancy, without therefore in

practice desiring to rub a sand grain of the private soil, which, from the position of the state, is

managed with no remark to be made from the perspective of realm—where

no misuse is present, there

the state has practically lost its right, there private property is part of the state’s guaranteed rule of law.

II.7. Special Geopolitics: Influences of Space, Shape, and

Position

I consider it herewith demonstrated that the organic interpretation of the realm, and this interpretation

alone, gives a satisfying solution to all hereto associated problems. This interpretation alone is therefore

reconcilable with the modern way of thought which seeks connection within the moving diversity of

phenomena.

We see therefore the realm with its different attributes not as a transient auxiliary or loose and

fungible attachment to the person of the state, but as a content within its own essence, in much and to a

great extent decisive of its actions and entire development. Already on this general and orienting part

we have found such influences beyond just and unjust128 from the state’s natural side, so that great parts

of history lay clear in this light. New contributions to this political necessity shall meet us in the special

geopolitics, with their observations on separate parts of the realm—in particular space, shape, and

position129.

II.7.1. Space

As the earth is organized, the wide space must assert itself in the form of large states, and as large states

expand, the course sinks for the small. This is certainly a law with many aberrations. The map of

Europe itself still has in our short century seen new small states emerge, while giant dominions such as

Canada and Brazil barely weigh on the political scales; and Holland was in the 17th century a Great

Power with 700 (German) square miles’ space, while Poland with 10,000 was not. Fundamentally,

125 vanhäfvd. Refers specifically to land.

126 uppsikt. Literally, watch.

127 överäganderätt

128 bortom rätt och orätt. Davidsen (p. 243) interprets this recurring phrase (III., V.2.1.) as a translation of “jenseits von

Gut und Böse” (“beyond good and evil”), reference to Friedrich Nietzsche. The author uses the German words twice

(III.3.3., IV.3.2.).

129 rum, gestalt och läge

these facts prove nothing more than the natural relationship that great spaces are organized slower than

small. It is a difference in level of development. Under otherwise similar circ*mstances it is therefore

merely a question of time before the great realms will have grown into their space, and the indicated

tendency is then valid without reservation.

That history in fact places all the greater significance on space, that is shown most clearly in the

succession of banner-carrying trade powers: Venice, a city, Holland, a delta country, England, an island

realm—and thereafter (already suggested by Treitschke 40 years ago and Gladstone 30 years ago)

U.S.A., a continent. Hereof follows now a clear consequence. Lively, able states within a limited space

stand under the categorical imperative to expand their space, by colonization, unification, or conquest

of various types. This was England’s situation and is presently Japan’s and Germany’s: as one sees, no

pure pull for conquest, but natural and necessary growth for the sake of self-preservation. As different

times use different measures, so does this law act to different degrees. The classic example is close: if

the Prussia of Frederic the Great was sufficient for the balance of the 18 th century, so was Bismarck’s

Germany necessary for the 19th, and now, as the standard has bloated itself to the enormous dominions

of England, Russia, and the U.S.A., the balance seems to call for a Mitteleuropa130 either in the smaller

format of Germany-Austria-Hungary (Naumann), or more preferably the greater, with the Levant

thereto (Jäckh). Here meets us the picture of a state complex, or a state bloc, to satisfy the demands of

space, and similar bloc-building appears to be shaping a Pan-america, although the leitmotif is less

clear. But in this entire development toward greater realm formations we trace inescapably a political

necessity, and the statesmen’s freedom is limited in the whole to finding ways for its realization.

It is now clear that this growing scale means a concerning moment for the sovereignty of the

smaller states. The great realm exercises a sort of gravity on the lesser ones already as a physical mass;

Deckert has noted this for the American state system, with the U.S. for a political sun, and the same

phenomenon is very eye-catching on Russia’s account contra Asia and even against certain smaller

Slavic peoples in Europe; against the other western states, Russia’s physical attraction is neutralized by

spiritual repulsion, due to its lower level of culture. On the other hand, the great and uniform space is

itself a stimulus for political expansion: over Russia’s steppes, America’s prairies, and England’s seas

wanders the eye out into the endless, igniting the conqueror’s longing outward—while the small

peoples in their narrow conditions easily fall into a vegetable state as the petite-bourgeois before his

mirror in the small town. Here we see the large space’s tendency to politically expand itself, just as the

great capital.

On the other hand, one may not overlook the factors which stand in the way of unconstrained

widening. To a certain degree, the great space appears to carry great difficulties for cohesion even in

the beloved age of communications. The growing circumfugal tendency grows with an increasing

vulnerability outward as friction increases with the stretching of the borders. To these hazards of the

space itself come also moral shortcomings as the expansions exceeds real survival essentials. The more

relevant development hereof belongs to ethnopolitics and economic politics, which shall teach us what

lies at the bottom of the endless expansion. It shall then be shown that the future is not so dark for the

smaller states, even if the present times appear to threaten their full sovereignty with great dangers.

130 Mellaneuropa, “Middle Europe”

Also in the political forest, that law applies which prevents the trees from growing into the heavens and

choking out the bushes.

II.7.2. Shape

Just as we now have seen the space as a factor of great significance in the states’ policies, so shall we

not rarely be able to establish the same for the territorial shape, or the realm figure131. The ideal here is

a concentric figure, because it is most fit for cohesion around a central point. The French and the

Spanish motherland comes close to this ideal. An extreme opposite to this was Prussia at the beginning

of the 18th century, which was not even connected, but consisted of three disjoint primary parts; here,

the state’s policy must move toward the joining of the parts into a unity. But also the present Austria’s

figure with long extended arms (Galicia, Dalmatia) is by itself impossible; there, the union with

Hungary, which fills the gap, has a purely outwardly motivation; also Bosnia and Serbia fit well within

this extended embrace. In the same way, Romania’s longing for Siebenbürgen132 is already shown in its

shape of a pincer around this country. An all too great disproportion between length and width is also of

evil, as it makes difficult communication and the task of defense, in particular when it gives the realm a

quality of uniformity. This is the case of Chile, a hundred-mile shoreline and mountainside that has all

too much a need of widening, thereof the conflicts with the neighbors to the north beyond the desert of

Atacama as well as to the east beyond the Andes; Norway too suffers from similar weaknesses in shape

and position—a motive for the union with Sweden, which certainly is covered by opposite motives and

different perspectives.

Details of the realm’s outer form may also occasionally permit interesting political conclusions.

The “Caprivi finger” in German South-West Africa and the “duck bill” in Cameroon may well have had

local considerations (participation in the rivers of Zambezi and Chari), but the latter’s

successor of

1911, the two “lobster claws,” grapple indubitably after the Congo State itself. In the same way one

may in the “panhandle” of the United States, Alaska’s hanging wedge between Canada and the Ocean,

read political aspirations for (western) Canada. Our own map contributes a shining example to the

north, where a long, thin wedge of the Russian-Finnish dominion is extended in the direction of the

Malangen fjord; when one now recalls that Russia before the establishment of this border had claims all

the way to the fjord in question, one cannot avoid seeing in this map figure an index finger toward the

Atlantic, much like in the bulge nearby a closed fist for the Varangians.133

II.7.3. Position

It is clear that the position in similar cases plays into the influence which the territory’s shape exercises.

Among all geographical influences on the states’ actions ought those proceeding from the position be

the most numerous and strongest. We do not speak then of the significance of a position under the

equator or by the edge of the ecumene or the physical situation at all, although that too may impact

politics decisively—such a connection shall be noted on the account of the small states below. Here, we

131 riksfiguren

132 German name for Transylvania.

133 See Kjellén, Studies of Sweden’s Political Borders (Studier öfver Sveriges politiska gränser) Ymer 1899, p. 329, Arldt,

op. cit. p. 550, notes also that Scandinavia’s northern border is “labile,” not “stabile.” (author)

will keep to the purely political position, the states’ placement next to one another, and the cultural

position with respect to global communications.

England with no immediate neighbors and Germany with 8 such, of which three are Great

Powers, show us two extreme types. It is a priori clear that their freedom of action will be much

different: Germany cannot choose allies and political pathways as freely as England; its elasticity is

limited by the large number of neighbors with their concentric pressure. Worse than this, though, is

under certain circ*mstances the one-sided neighborhood position, with the pressure of a greater power

in the back. Such is the case with Portugal after 1640 and Norway after 1905: no such sincerely meant

guarantees, no “neutral zones” or other international-legal rules may entirely lift this pressure which by

the necessity of natural law exceeds from the greater power toward the lesser; therefore this positions

determines the entire political journey of states concerned, so that they appear to sense a need of

seeking counter-pressure from the sea It is thus this situation which drove Portugal into the arms of

England and Norway into integrity- and neutrality treaties with foreign powers, among which Sweden

did not find a place. Such a position is evidently a property of the respective states which they may not

come away from and which determine their policy by the necessity which the free will of a state-friend

cannot abstain from.

A similar situation has on the part of Holland and Romania been neutralized by the fortunate

circ*mstance that they have two rival great powers in the back. But the situation is darkened thereof,

that they sit on the mouths of one neighbor’s primary rivers—along the border of Germany and

Holland does Rhine and by the border of Austria-Hungary does Danube carry an immense traffic—

while the rivers of Spain become navigable only by the border to Portugal and the Norwegian-Swedish

border rivers have no significance for the movement of persons. This makes the Netherlands’ position

decisively worse; that is ignoring that they trample Belgium on its most sensitive toe, the mouth of

Schelde. It is a dangerous thing for a tiny state to have its seat placed right on the foot of a great power.

What mildens the situation of the Netherlands is another property of its interesting position, namely the

neighborhood of England, in reality the third great neighbor (as France through Belgium seems like a

second one): England must regard it as question of life to keep Germany from the mouths of the Rhine.

II.7.4. Transformations of Position

Now it is to note that the difficult position of the Netherlands has only emerged in recent times. When

the state was formed, it was one of many on this side of the continent; the current position has emerged

in the most recent age by German concentration in the German Realm134’s great power and by its

industry’s grand concentration in Rhine-Westphalia. Here we see how positions move, relocate

themselves, while the states lie still. One very interesting case of such a transformation of position135 is

offered by our own country in the current century. The inner ring of small states (Finland, Norway,

Denmark), which has long felt to us as a sort of buffer against the outer girdle of great powers (Russia,

England, Germany), has become broken by Russia’s policy toward Finland after 1899, the union’s

dissolution under English auspices in 1905, and the institution of direct connections to Germany after

1906; so, we may henceforward count on the immediate neighborhood of the great powers. We have

134 That is, the German Reich (rike).

135 lägeförvandling

also lately on a few occasions felt the cold breath of one in our face, namely in the Åland question of

1908 and 1916; whose question’s sensitivity again depends on on the archipelago’s position by our own

house corner (a threat to the capital and a lock for the sea link to Norrland). That the great powers have

become our real neighbors, thereof delivers the World War evidence daily.

Here we meet a realm type which is determined by the position exclusively: the buffer state. It

plays a great role in the political world, particularly in our time. The lot of such a state is not pleasant,

as it in principle lives on the static balance between two (or more) pressures. Korea has run the risk to

the end; Siam, Afghanistan, and Persia have been pushed hard by this pressure. Buffer politics have

played no smaller role in Europe, in particular on the Balkan peninsula. This is the secret in the 1878

Treaty of Berlin’s map: Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia have for their independent presence to thank the

other great powers’ desire to lay buffers between Russia and Constantinople, conveniently

corresponding to Russia’s own desire to win obedient realms136 and allies along the same route. When

we later observe that the other row of small states in Mitteleuropa—Switzerland, Luxembourg,

Belgium, and Holland—correlate with the historical friction zone between Roman and Germanic

Europe, we see a sudden light, that buffer politics contain a life insurance for small states in the age of

great powers. Portugal, Greece, and Norway demonstrate another chance for existence—namely, in the

periphery; but the World War has borne witness of that this chance is of lesser value, so long as the sea

namely obeys only one single master. No third possibility appears to exist anymore. The small states

seem to face the same fate in the world of politics as the natural peoples have in that of culture, to be

pushed into the peripheries or be conserved in border districts—or to vanish.

But great powers too may in the name of balance serve buffer purposes. The entire history of

Austria has been marked thereof that the wide folk-road of the Danube and the plains of Hungary draw

foreign peoples; thus it was in the beginning Europe’s defense against the Avars, thereafter the

Magyars, thereafter the Turks, and lastly it has served as such against the Russians. If we suspend our

view to a planetary perspective, it seems that the same role is cut out for the Russian world-realm; just

as the Hungarians once were the threat to Europe, but were domesticated and later themselves took part

in the border guard against the Turks, thus the situation does not seem so distant for when Russia also

will serve the cause of Europe as the world-spanning buffer

between the white and the yellow—a

definitive defeat in the World War would immediately point to this direction.

This middle position, which is the precondition of the buffer character and which for small

states easily may become fatal, is, on the other hand, from an economic point of view an exclusive

advantage. There, Italy has its natural stance as as link between Europe and the Levant, whereto also its

realm shape as a pier also indicates. There lie the conditions for a powerful trade development for

Holland and Belgium, Switzerland and Denmark; the latter partially retains Scania as a commercial

upland after losing it politically. From the same point of view, Russia’s slow development is explained:

it is the backside of two continents, located outside the trade routes of all the world’s seas. The Russian

longing for the seas shows itself as a natural instinct to escape this shadow into the economic sunside.

But here too we may observe position transformation of particularly notable sort. Countries

have, much like urban real estate, their “undeserved appreciations in value.” England’s entire

contemporary development is an effect of America’s discovery, which suddenly moved it from the

136 lydriken

periphery of Europe to the center of the world. In the same manner, Japan’s sun could not have been

taken seriously before the Great Ocean was drawn into the real global communication network. Which

immense gain in property value did not Egypt gain by the Suez canal? As a direct political reflex came

England’s occupation of the country. At the same time and for the same reason, the course sank for the

Cape colony, the old transit station on the way to India—and it would come to ruin entirely if not for

Kimberley’s diamonds and Johannesburg’s gold giving it a local production value in place of the

commercial transit position.

II.7.5. Historical Sides

Lastly, may a remark find place in this chapter concerning the transformation of the state’s entire

perspective as consequence of the general development. Their life pulsates richer at times by the one, at

times by the other border, moving between them with the course of history. Ratzel speaks of this

phenomenon as the wandering of the “historical side”137; as an example he takes Germany, which over

the course of time has moved this side from the south (Italy) to the west (France), north (Sweden) and

east. Closer and more dramatic is the example of Russia, as it until the beginning of the 19 th century

worked overwhelmingly on an Atlantic front, until 1878 on a Mediterranean, until 1905 on an Asiatic,

and thereafter anew on a Mediterranean: a movement north—south—east—south. But its capital lies

still on the Neva, as an anachronism from that time when it saw its greatest adversary in Sweden.

Straight across, on the other side of the Baltic, lies the capital of Sweden with its eastward perspective,

fit for the Baltic idea, founded in a time when Finland belonged to the dominion and more natural for

that time; but Sweden’s historical pendulum swings between the east and the west (south), the Baltic

and the Scandinavian idea; and, should the latter be definitively victorious, then the position indicates

Gothenburg to be a more natural center. Another example, and the heaviest of all, of a similar

displacement of the center of gravity can be anticipated for the United States. Thus far, for historical

and economic reasons, oriented as good as exclusively toward the east, the side of Europe, where it has

its origin and where also the capital is located, the great union has in latter time gained more and more

interest in the south, where its pan-American great idea shall be realized, and in the west, where the

great future market of China attracts. The debut in this direction in 1897-98 (Hawaii, Philippines) has

already given its pacific coast an increased significance, and the time may come when victories and

risks (Japan) transform the Pacific into its “historical side.”

II.8. Conclusion, Geopolitics

These are the perspectives which are best suited for a recognition of the wild and partially still virgin

area of geopolitics, where Ratzel is the great plowman and forerunner. I have sought to present the

relationship between state and realm not as an external one, owner and property, but as an internal, best

compared to the relationship between a person and his physical body. I believe myself to have

strengthened this understanding with sufficient content, serving to teach how the free will of the state is

in multiple aspects linked by strong bonds with fastenings to the realm’s properties; at the same time, I

have desired to demonstrate the manner in which the relationship between them has under constant flux

137 “historiska sidan”

with growing culture become all the more innerly and living. And only a pure world-absent asceticism

will in this connection find anything unhealthy or degrading.

With insowise widened experience, we continue by moving the observation to the other

fundamental element of the state—the people.

Third Chapter

The State as People: Ethnopolitics

From the study of geopolitics we take home the most important lessons, that the state in its realm has a

natural aspect which is the source of countless interests and necessities beyond just and unjust, and also

that this natural aspect according to the “principle of geographical individuality”138 tends to correlate

with a natural territory on the surface of the earth, harmonically interconnected on the inside,

sufficiently separated from the neighbor on the outside. At the same time, we observed in the state itself

a certain ability to make its its realm natural; they stand in an intimate interaction as a person with his

body.

III.1. Connection of the People with the State

The next step of our study leads to observation of the human material within the essence of the state.

Seen externally, the state appears not as a piece of country, but also as a mass of people in the frame of

the country. The study of the state in this respect becomes therefore the study of an ethnic organism,

and can reasonably be called ethnopolitics139. It links itself, as one sees, to the object of ethnography,

but is not concerned thereof from any perspective other than as content of the state.

From one aspect, this ethnic character of the state catches the eye even before the geographical.

When the state is imagined at rest, then the realm becomes the primary; when it is thought in action, the

people are imagined in the first place. In the political science of the Negroes, the land also means little

or nothing against the people, as Ratzel demonstrates. Even further back, we see people without

country, whether they have broken up their house beams, as the Germanics in Mitteleuropa in the

centuries after the birth of Christ and Bantus and Boers in South Africa in the 1700s and 1800s, or

whether they have not yet settled themselves. It has already been noted (see II.1.) that we cannot

ascribe them the character of a state. The people may be older than the state, and are always that at the

time of the primary formation of the state, but become state first by marrying a country and organizing

a society.

The old Greeks placed the state’s center of gravity in the people to such an extent that they use

the plural demonym and nothing else to denote the state: they said “Lacedaemonians,” “Persians”

where we would rather say “Sparta” and “Persia.” But we could also naturally say as they did. We say

also “the English people” or “nation” as a synonym for “England.” Our names for country or realm join

the demonym—only Netherlands and Austria140 are purely geographical—and other realm names are

formed purely on an ethnic basis: Belgium, Hungary, Turkey, and all of the Danubian states141.

138 “geografiska individualitetens princip”

139 Woltman (1903) says “Politische Anthropologie.” From a certain

perspective, the name demopolitics also offers itself.

Though, I find the expression more suitable for that sub-discipline of the ethnopolitics which treats the people’s mass as

such (the population) in connection to the already naturalized expression demographics. (author)

140 Nederland, Österrike

141 Belgien, Ungarn, Turkiet. Danubian states—possibly Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Bohemia (Bulgarien, Rumänien,

Ungern, Böhmen).

We can thus imagine the state without people even less than without land. The states are

husbands142 as much as they are landowners; they may like the old Russian nobles count their

dominions in “souls.”143 But they are slave-owners as little as they are mere landowners. Much like

they cannot transpose themselves from their countries, so can they neither exchange peoples with one

another. If Sweden were emptied of Swedes, and Russians moved therein, the Swedish state would be

as dead as if it had left its territory; the state is thus bound to its people, and the soil alone does not

create the people. Farmhands may leave a farmer, renters a landlord, even children a father, and the

property, house, home are still there; but a people that leaves its country kills its state. Thus the state is

insolubly united also with the people as such.

For individual citizens, the case is different. If the state may in times of need lose a little of its

country, it may also lose parts of its people. This, as we have already noted, is even easier. It follows

thereof that the people is his mobile element which characterizes the elasticity of the state; even if

citizens emigrate in great numbers and never return, the state may survive this, so long as he retains a

core at home.

Thus the state can also receive citizens from other states and by naturalization turn them into its

own. Here we see an exchange between the states which geopolitics does not know (other than in the

periphery, in colonial land exchanges such as between France and England in 1904). Solidarity between

state and people shows itself in another way; the state protects its own in foreign countries, so long as

they themselves have not by naturalization there broken the bond.

The mobility of the people is likewise an easy perishability. If the state can ambivalently see

individual citizens leaving the country, then this is explained also thereof that the state is accustomed to

parting with individuals: every year it sees 15, 20, or 30 thousands of its own, depending on mortality,

vanish forever. But it sees at the same time, if all is as it ought to be, just as many come to be by the

way of natural birth rates. It is a constant exchange, which in itself does not concern the state; only if

the factors therewith are removed from the normal—by a great mortality or low nativity—does its

attention wake up, as will be shown more precisely below.

III.1.1. Connection of the People through the Time

In this direction we meet another important observation. If the state is one with its people, then it is not

merely with the individuals which at a given moment fill its space and perform its work. Its carrying

foundation of human substance flows constantly away. The state is one with all generations, the living

as well as the unborn and the dead, just as the tree with its leaves in all years. This is the first corollary

of an organic interpretation on this point.

The current population of Sweden therefore do not form the people; they form only the last

generation of the Swedish people. The people stretches itself through all times, just as a river which

remains the same though the particles of water change. Aristotle already sensed this and made use of

this picture, although he was hardly able to utilize it in his political science. The idea was muddled in

various ways, and in Rousseau we see the world-historical representation of the opposite, mechanical

142 That is, head of household.

143 Russian nobility counted numbers of owned peasants by souls. See, for example, the novel Dead Souls by Nikolai

Gogol.

view with all of its political and legal consequences. It belonged together with that mechanical

understanding of state whose practical mirror were the cabinet politics and whose most radical fruit

was the partition of Poland, a partition also of the people: if the people are a mechanical and transient

union of people, the reservations against dissolving it are diminished.

Against a teaching with such consequences, it was clear that a reaction was to come. We shall

not halt ourselves here for criticism; it is sufficient to note that, already one hundred years ago, Adam

Müller fixed the organic perspective in the following definition: a people are “the elevated community

of a long line of past, currently living, and coming generations, who are all connected in a great inner

union of life and death.” From the same perspective, the state becomes an “alliance of the past and the

coming generations.”144 The Historical School of Jurisprudence contributed to this point of view,

though not without particular consequence either. Already in 1899, in a concept analysis of the

fatherland145 idea, I have sought to fix it;146 its foremost advocate in the domestic literature is perhaps

Boethius, who in his political writings time after time returns thereto.147

What lies in the plate of this political view in our contemporary everyday opinion is obviously

the political consequences such as have already been indicated. It cuts against the simple solution of

democracy for the problem of the popular will as current citizens’ will at the moment, paired with its

identification of this popular will as the state’s will itself. Our organic understanding motivates

institutions for the defense of minorities and coming kin, to which the advanced democratism is not

only indifferent, but also disdainful. But if one can only hold the thought free from such practical

concerns, then the fact must stand clear that the state’s human basis is constantly shifting, while the

state constantly remains. The state existed then, when the the current generation trod into its law, and it

shall remain when the same generation leaves life behind, like the string play which sounds long before

and long after a single part of a piece. This thought is of decisive significance with respect to the state’s

ethnic nature. It adds to it another characteristic of continuity to the side of the territorial; it is the

difference here that the external exchange, due to the greater malleability of the people, is much faster;

this is not a difference in quality but only in degree, and we shall soon observe the factors which make

even the difference in degree lesser than it initially appears.

Already this naked fact that generation after generation lives its life in joy and despair under the

wing of the same state cannot avoid giving its human element a certain cohesion, regardless of whether

it at the outset contained greater or lesser hom*ogeneity. It is, to speak with Hans Larsson, “the feeling

of honor and solidarity which comes to comrades on the same boat to share a fate.”148 When one

144 Müller, Elemente der Staatskunst (“Elements of the State Art”), 1809, cited by Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und

Nationalstaat, pp. 130, 129, and Boethius in Statsvet. Tidskrift, 1908, p. 140. (author)

145 fosterland

146 “Sweden’s current population does not form the Swedish people, but only its last generation: a wave in the current, a

moment in a lifecycle. The fatherland embraces not only the now living millions, but also the dead and the unborn

millions, by which the living generation is insolubly bound by memory and hope. In this way, Sweden’s whole is

something more than its visible parts. Were it different, then our society would not have been of a higher kind than the

ants’ hill or the bees’ hive.” See nowadays Nationell samling (1906), p. 166-67; cf. “Nationalitetsidén” (“The Idea of

Nationality”),

1898, ibid. p. 138 (author)

147 “Rösträttsproblemet” (“The Problem of Suffrage”), 1904. “Richerts politiska ideer” (“Richert’s Political Ideas”), Histor.

Tidskrift, 1905; “Olika upfattningar av orden folk, nation etc.” (“Different Interpretatiions of the Words ‘People,’

‘Nation,’ and so on”), Statsvet. Tidskrift, 1908; last, “Om statslifvet” (“On the State-Life”), 1916. (author)

148 Hans Larsson. “Nation och Stat,” in Idéer och makter, 1908, p. 113. (author)

interacts daily on the same deck, under the same command and the same risk, this becomes a natural

and necessary thing. Foremostly it is two of the state’s areas of activity that act to bind and to brother

its human limbs: justice and the judicial process in peace and the solidaric responsibility in war. Even

without particularly working thereon, the state must herewith create a certain inner unity within that

people whose external alliance it in specific sense is. By binding citizens within itself, it binds them by

a common “general feeling”149 (Kirchoff).

III.1.2. Loyalty and Nationality

I denote this solidarity as loyalty in technical sense. By this word I thus understand the bond of

community in right and duty which unite all citizens of a state by one and the same sense of

responsibility, with no regard for all that otherwise binds or divides, and as well looking past what

particular form of state the question holds: monarchy or republic. Loyalty is without doubt one of the

primary forces of history. By its nature it is dynamic, that is to say that it can change to an unending

degree, and this only within one state through time. Here the state power itself has a task to observe. By

certain legislation and a wise political overhead it has in its power to preserve, create, or restore a

normal measure on this barometer. This entire subject appears to fall into the fields of social and

regimental politics, just as loyalty itself is a concept of regimental politics. That we have already

touched on it here has its motive in that loyalty right in the domain of ethnopolitics meets an opponent

whose reaction thereagainst belongs to the modern state-life’s most characteristic and most deeply

intrusive presences.

We see the conflict already in Germany, where Danes, Poles, and Frenchmen each in their

corners react against the state and are under attack by the state. We see the same picture at a greater

scale in Russia, in all the borderland-peoples’ opposition against the russification that flows from the

state-thought. In Finland on its own we meet two ethnic factors, Swedes and Finns, in a domestic

dispute of similar kind which has long concealed the peoples’ feeling for the common russification.

Belgium displays the same theater, in the duel between the Flemish and the Walloons, where the latter’s

traditional advantage has gradually been giving in. Austria, finally, gives use the picture of an

occasionally almost anarchic struggle between different ethnic groups, so that one has many times

asked oneself whether there at all is any place for loyalty; while Hungary has only by a magyarization

à la russe been able to uphold a shadow of ethnic unity.

The presentation is in no wise complete. Who is then this opponent to loyalty that has achieved

and achieves so much noise, so much internal discord, so much paralyzing worry? We call him by

another, a well-known term: nationality150. It is the struggle between nationality and loyalty which

passes through great parts of the state-world with varied results; in Germany and Russia and Hungary

with apparent advantage on the side of loyalty, in Austria and Finland on that of nationality. But there

are also scenes where the struggle seems to have been blown away, even though its preconditions are

present. So do Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians sit in Switzerland side by side, but they keep—this

was at least the case before the World War—still and peaceful with respect to each other; nationality

149 “allmänkänsla”

150 The word is no older than the time of the French revolution. Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, p. 141, has

not found it earlier than 1798 (in Novalis), and the Dictionary of the French Academy has not included it until the

edition of 1835, see Ruyssen, Le Problème des Nationalités, 1916, p. 14-15. (author)

has capitulated, loyalty rules undisputed. Neither is there in the disorderly ethnography of the United

States any notable concern from the various nationalities which gather around the Anglo-Saxon core; it

is an picture of harmony which sharply deviates from the eternal struggle between certain of these

ethnicities at home in Europe.

We now concentrate our attention on this new elementary force which acts both peacefully or

with hostility against loyalty. It is not difficult to recognize nationality and see the difference. It is a

very noticeable phenomenon of co-belonging between humans, much like its rival, but acts in an

entirely different manner: not indirectly by the state-power, but directly citizens in-between; not from

above as a common barometric pressure, but from within and from the side as a common thermometric

degree. It shall also soon become clear to us that one belongs to nature as much as the other to culture.

In the lifeform of the state, the nationality is the other fundamental imprint beside the natural territory.

The human mass which is held together by loyalty alone within a state, we call people151 in

technical sense. The mass which is held together by nationality we denote, just as pregnantly, nation.

The relationship between them is the general ethnopolitics’ great problem, dominant within this

discipline much like the relationship between state and realm within geopolitics.

We have seen that the nationality is a determinant of essence152 and the nation the essence which

is so determined.153 What is a nation? Which factor or factors stand here as constituents? We cannot

carelessly skim over this question, much as is still lacking in the scientific clarity on this point.154 Thus

it demands a special investigation, which may perhaps for a period appear to lead away from our

political-scientific grounds, but will eventually lead us into the center thereof itself.

III.2. The Problem of the Nation

When one in the middle of the previous century in Italy gained political interest in the study of the

nature of nationality, one presented the following six indices: community of country, of descent and

race, of language, of customs and habits, of history, and of legal order outside religion. Two of these

have played a larger role than the others in the discussion: blood relation and community of language.

We begin our examination with the first of these, which lies closer to the word’s own terminology: the

genealogical solution.

151 folk

152 väsenbestämdhet

153 In a specific sense, one also uses the expression “nationality” for politically non-independent parts of a people, such as

Romanians, Slovaks, and so on in Hungary: one therefore calls the entire Austrian monarchy a “nationality-state,” in

contrast to unmixed “nation-states.” This is the only meaning that Ratzel attaches to the word, Die Erde und das Leben,

p. 674, while for example Kirchoff, Nation und Nationalitet, 1905, pp. 59-, and Ruyssen, p. 15, also consider the

abstract sense in the text here, (author)

154 From the real literature on this subject we may note: Bagehot, Der Ursprung der Nationen, tr. 1874, Rénan, Qu’est ce

qu’une nation, 1882, Neuman, Volk und Nation, 1888, Kirchoff, Zur Verständigung über die Begriffe Nation und

Nationalität, 1905, Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, 1908, pp. 1-19, also Die deutsche Erhebung, 1914, pp.

74-99, Boethius, “Olika upfattningar av orden folk, nation m. m.,” 1908 (Statsvet. Tidskrift, pp. 129-, 229-), Hans

Larsson, 1908, op. cit., pp. 104-114, Jellinek, pp. 116-121, Hornborg, “Ras, språk och nation,” 1914 (Finsk Tidskrift

231-250, c.f. following critique ibid. by Wikman), Ruedorffer, Grundzüge der Weltpolitik, 1914, pp. 5-31, Revue 15/4-

1/6 1915 (an enquête of “Principe des Nationalités”), Ruyssen, op. cit. 1916, I myself has contributed by studies on

“The Nationality Idea” (“Nationalitetsidén”), 1898 (now part of Nationell samling, pp. 130-161), also “The

Perishability of States and Nations”(“Staters och nationers förgänglighet”), 1908 (now Politiska essayer I, 3-11),

wherof one or another broken-off part returns in the following demonstration. (author)

III.2.1. The Genealogical Solution

It has long been a accepted axiom that the unity of nations stems from a shared descent. One

understood them as large families or kinship trees, with separate branches closer to or further from the

stem. Around this image, a category of myth-making was established which operated with an ur-father

(such as the “urman” of the Germanics and Odin of the Swedes in particular), or an ur-mother, or a

couple of ur-parents (as in Japan). It is a typical picture: all powerful peoples imagine themselves

“autochthons,”155 to use Tacitus’ remark about the Germanics. Even after such tales have begun losing

ground in peoples’ faith, the popular perception remains that it is blood ties which bind the nation. It is

a more or less conscious understanding which draws political obligations on the “brotherhood” of the

Scandinavian peoples, or “the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race” or England’s “motherhood” to

the American daughter-nation. Unfortunately, such debt letters are in history sooner or later protested

and rarely paid. This shows that kinship, at least to the nations themselves, does not stand as a

particularly obligating factor. If therefore the separate branches of the Roman race have indeed joined

together against the Central Powers in the World War (see III.6.) then this has little to do with sibling

sensibilities; to the extent that feelings have played a role here at all, it is the Roman cultural

community which has been the ferment here and not some natural voice of the blood. In the life of

nations, blood is hardly thicker than water according to the testimony of history.

This has in turn an explanation therein that the blood community, even if it initially exists, is not

easily preserved through the times. It cannot be disputed that Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes once

were one and the same nation—although it is futile here to seek a younger or older brother; it is also

historical fact that the Icelanders are a branch of the Norwegian stem, Americans of the English,

Canadians of the French, Dutch of the German, and Boers of the Dutch. But how have these relations

not been thinned over the course of times! We do not speak now of the influences of the foreign air, but

of the influences of blood-mixing with foreign nations. The strongest example may be the North

American, where the Anglic core is receding, while the nation is filled with other blood. The science

has long been clear on this case. It was in 1881 that Bluntschli proposed that “in the nations no blood-

bond can be demonstrated,” and the year after that Rénan in a much noted lecture expressed: “the truth

is that no pure race is given—to build politics on ethnographic analysis, that is to build a chimera.”156

A quick survey among the nations of Europe shall overwhelmingly demonstrate this. Most of

them in Europe have emerged before the eyes of history, so that we are able to distinguish the separate

elements. Thus Mommsen shows us a very fractured map of Spain in other, pre-Christian centuries:

Iberians and Celts, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans, in lively blending and on all stages of culture;

thereto came later by the migration from Europe Visigoths, Vandals, Suebi, while the migration from

Africa drove over the pillars of Hercules a wave of Moors and such peoples, and out of this entire mass

the Spanish people was gradually formed. The proud “blue” blood can thus hardly be particularly

indigenous. In England we have the exact same picture on a foundation of Celtic, Roman, and

Germanic races: there are Picts and Scots, Brits and Gauls of various kinds, there Romans and French

nomads have gathered, there arrived Danes directly from Southern Scandinavia and Angles and Saxons

155 indigenous

156 Bluntschli, Die nationale Staatenbildung und die deutsche Staat, 1881, Ernest R Rénan, op. cit. C.f. Kirchoff on this

subject, op. cit. p. 21, and Neumann p. 56. (author)

from North-Western Germany; and yet no one ought to dispute that the English nation now stands

before us in the clearest and most solid shape. The French nation is also made of Celtic, Roman, and

Germanic races (Iberians and Ligurians, Greeks and Romans, Franks and Burgundians); in the German

blood a large percentage of Slavism is present, whose remnants still hide in Lusatia and by the Spree;

on the Italian peninsula, Celts, Ligurians, Etruscans, and Greeks created an initial blood mixing,

whereto came another in the medieval age by additions of Langobards, Normans, and Saracens; in the

same manner the Greek tribe has in ancient times a mass of different roots, while the Neo-Greek nation

is formed from this old blood plus Slavic plus Albanian. How many Finnish and Tatar tribes have not

gone up into the Russian blood, along with Scandinavians and Germans over the time; and who can

measure and weigh all the elements of the contemporary Chinese type! Incomparably firmer and

clearer is the Japanese nation, and history knows no larger influxes there save Koreans in the early

medieval time; but the Archaeologist and the Linguist find Arctic and Malay characteristics, and

possibly also Polynesian beside the Mongolian.

The purest blood in Europe is likely found in Scandinavia; yet Danes and Jutes have over the

course of times become strongly Germanized; in the anthropology of Norwegians one has noted a

distinctly darker and short-headed element (with its core in Jäderen157); Icelanders have received Celtic

influences. One time it appeared as if the Swedish nation would take home the trophy in the question of

racial purity, and even though the hypothesis of the Swedes’ and Geats’ identity does not appear to be

established, we may well defend the poets diagnosis “of Aryan blood, the purest and oldest”; but it

cannot be left unnoticed that the tribe has received strong admixtures of Danish and German in the

Medieval as well as weaker admixtures of Finnish and Walloon in the 17th century.

Thus, wherever we see, and the deeper we see, the more the eye is lost in a whirlpool of

ethnicities, mixed with one another to greater or lesser intensities, so that incalculable variants and

transitions appear instead of the pure colors, which the genealogical hypothesis appears to presuppose.

We are not concerned with measuring the percentage of these admixtures; we only establish as a

scientific and nowadays generally accepted result that the genealogical viewpoint is not sufficient to

solve the riddle of the nation.158

III.2.2. The Linguistic Solution

We transition to the other characteristic signifier, language: the linguistic solution. Here one has

attempted to find the certain sign of nationality, so that the linguistic community is understood as blood

community, and one has even attempted to trace the family trees to the root by this cipher. How many

theories of ur-peoples and brotherly peoples are not backed by this research method! It is the glaring

results of comparative linguistics that has led to this overconfidence, much like all new methods and

discoveries. Here as before not much observation is required to find the limitation of this solution.

157 Arbo, “Carte de l’indice céphalique de Norvège” (“Map of the Cephalic Index of Norway”), in Revue d’anthropoligie

1887, and other works; see also Norway; offic. Publication for the Paris exhibition

1900, p. 81, and Reusch, Norges

Geografi, I, 1915, pp. 101-. (author)

158 “A people is not merely one by birth surplus naturally grown human herd, but an end-result of many connections,

wanderings, sunderings, and new connections,” Steinthal, Dialekt, Sprache, Volk, Staat, Rasse, 1896, see Kirchoff, pp.

26-27. (author)

The problem already lies in that nations may change languages, while not as easily as one

changes clothes, but still fundamentally and completely. Entire nations may do it, as the Bulgarians;

they are a Finnish people, but accepted a Slavic language since migrating from Volga to the Danube.

Parts of nations do so in foreign countries even easier: Danes became in Normandy, linguistically

speaking, Romance, transferred to England, changed a second time, and became Germanic again.

Following linguistics, Spanish and Romanians are closely related; but the former’s oldest known

ancestors spoke Iberian while the latter’s Thracian, before the Roman dominion by its long roads left its

linguistic stamp on them. Such a language exchange may occur voluntarily, as when the Wends by

Spree all the more ceased to speak “Serbski” and found German more practical, or in the same way the

Romance tongues in the Graubünden by the way of communications go into “Schwizer Dütsch”; it is

the same history as with our Finns in centermost Sweden’s Finnish forests, and we see it to the greatest

scale in U.S.A., where English gradually drowns out the immigrants’ various tongues. It may also

happen by force, as we shall find later; but in both cases it demonstrates the hazard of tying back

language to tribe.

How little the language community demonstrates nationality is best seen on maps of the English

language. English is spoken by, besides the island’s own children, North Americans and Irishmen; and

even if one determined to extend the nationality to these, it would to be impossible to count the

Negroes in America as Englishmen, although their speech may be English! Likewise the Spanish-

Mexicans and Portuguese-Brazilians each speak the same language.

It is therefore shown that the language may stand in an external connection to the nationality.

Language is a sharp witness of a full and complete natiogenesis159; though, it is not a cause but an effect

thereof. It is the mirror of nationality where its temper and genius lies clear, and similarly its most

intensive tool, wherewith it holds itself together and preserves itself; therefore the nation clings to the

language, regards it as a bulwark with whose preservation it senses its own cohesion; but this depends

more on the content of the language, its spiritual wealth of thoughts, wills, and moods than on its form.

It is likely that this content in the length also determines the form—thus the American English is

already strongly distinct from the domestic, and will likely with time become its own language—but as

a diagnosis of nationality, or the solution to its riddle, the language at a given point is not sufficient.

Nationality lies behind the language.160

III.2.3. The Psychological Solution

Both the linguistic and the genealogical solution must therefore be said to have been made bankrupt;

and the pettier alternatives in the enumeration above are even less good. Disillusioning as fixing a

nation’s entity by one element or even a complex of objective elements therefore is, one has lately

wished to place the entity of nationality into the purely subjective domain. A nation, says Rénan, is a

great unitary group which bases itself on “the consciousness of shared sacrifice for the coexistence and

the decision to live together in the future as well”; thus the existence of the nation becomes “a day by

day continuing plebiscite,” and the nation itself a “soul” (“une âme, un principe spirituel”). It becomes

159 Nationbildning, “nation-formation.” One may be tempted to render this concept by the more common cognate

expression of nation-building, though this does not quite fit, as this expression suggests deliberate effort by state actors;

among more common expressions, ethnogenesis would be the more fitting term.

160 See also The Great Powers, 1905 ed., II, pp. 94-95. (author)

therefore a psychological solution: soul community. This manner of viewing has won the support of

geographers such as Kirchoff, sociologists such as Gumplovicz, historians such as Meinecke, and

lawmen such as Jellinek, among whom the last does not in nationality see anything other than a

subjective concept. According to this stance on the question, nationality’s riddle would be solved by

Schiller’s formula (in Wilhelm Tell) from the oath by Rütli—the same that one reads on the inside by

the main entrance of the German Reichstag’s palace—“wir wollen sein ein einig Volk von Brüdern!”161

It does not fall to anyone to deny the significance of this moment; it shall also be shown in our

coming investigation. But as one has placed the entire solution here, one has once again committed the

common mistake of treating a very complicated problem as an equation with a single unknown. It

seems to not require more than a simple observation of a concrete nation, for example, the English, to

learn that there are also objective elements included. We cannot accept a position that places the entire

nature of the nation into the realm of suggestion. We do not believe in any substanceless folk-souls162,

which fly homeless around to temporarily settle in a group of people and thereby turn it into a nation.

We believe that the nation exists beforehand with its elements, and that particular circ*mstances are

only required to release its will and consciousness.163

The difficulty of fixing the concept of the nation lies naturally in this complicated quality which

follows partially thereof that the nations are found in the middle of the constant stream of history, and

partially thereof that they flow into one another without fixed borders. Ethnopolitics here has the same

difficulty as petrography, the inorganic nature’s system, though even more staggered by the mobility of

the human element. But just as little as this difficulty has prevented the petrographer from

distinguishing certain determinate minerals, so little ought they prevent the ethnographer and

ethnopolitics from distinguishing types of humans and fix their concepts.

III.3. The Biological Solution

III.3.1. An Ethnic Individual

We distinguish as such human types, placed between the individual and humanity, the factual

formations participating in history which we call nations. The understanding lies close to Schule-

Gävernitz’ definition: “one unique in kind individual, standing in-between humans and humanity, to

whom the human in moral conviction voluntarily submits, and who in the great cultural context of

humanity has a determined purpose to fill.”164 The nation is thus an ethnic individual165, just as the

realm a geographical: a person of greater embrace and lesser content than the separate individual—a

“makroanthropos,” a “potenziertes Individuum” which “faithfully replicates the human’s entire

sensual-rational being,” to speak with Meinecke.

Already 18 years ago, in a study of the idea of nationality, I denoted the nation in relationship to

its members as that person who possesses all of their and only their common qualities.166 I am yet to

161 “We want to be one united people of brothers! ”

162 folksjälar

163 May also be understood as “only particular circ*mstances are required ...”

164 Britischer Imperialismus und Englischer Freihandel, 1906, p. 400. (author)

165 etnisk individ

166 See Nationell Samling, p. 134. (author)

find any better, although I am not blind to the schematic within this diagnosis. It sees the solution to the

national problem behind the simple solutions: the biological perspective. It portrays the nation as a

living type, around which the individuals vary and to which they gravitate.

III.3.2. On the Strength of the Nationality

The degree of this variation and gravity determines the strength of the nation, which is the same as the

vital power of the nation. Where individuals isolate themselves by their own qualities and interests, so

that the sense of community is unable to counterbalance private egotism, there we see a weak

nationality. Where the individuals once again feel their co-belonging as a living power, there the nation

gains a life guarantee of immeasurable significance. So the nation-sense167 is a fluidum which may rise

to a complete frenzy, but also shrink to a latent condition or entirely wither away. This variability

explains why the peoples react so differently to the same types of actions: politics which would be

impossible in one state are tolerated without difficulty by the public opinion in another, so that the

manner of reacting in politics to the attentive observer permits conclusions with respect to degree of

nationality. Thus it is as much true for nationality as loyalty that it is a dynamic idea 168 with nearly

unlimited degree of fluctuation.

We note further that every nation by itself appears to be subject to this malleability. The same

nation, which one time may appear apathetic with respect to its national interests, may at another time

spring up as an irritated lion to its defense, When one follows the history of a nation, one finds there

nationality like a geyser with intermittent flows. But it is also obvious that the degree of nationality

varies by people. The Englishman or the Chinese, who in all spaces and circ*mstances resemble

themselves enough, contrast without doubt strongly—in this respect already—against the German and

the Japanese, who are more sensitive to the pressure of the surroundings, more inclined to do “as the

Romans when in Rome”; therefore the former do not as easily dissolve into the surroundings as the

German or the Swede in America, just as once the Visigoth in Spain or the Dane in Normandy. It truly

wills to appear that in the various nations there is from the onset a greater or lesser national

determination.

III.3.3. On the Qualities of the Nation

Thus we meet here already an objective element in the national life. But with this reality of the degree

of nationality there is an even clearer one in its quality. The nations are without doubt personally

colored entities, with definite physical and psychical characteristics; certainly subject to change, much

like the individual’s character, but at an immeasurably slower pace, whereof they appear relatively

stable. Here anthropology and popular psychology169 enter as the assistive sciences of politics, though

they both would entirely be hovering in the air if there were no national reality to be found. The latter

discipline in particular has much to teach us, for the practical politics rest to an eminent degree on a

precise estimation of the nations’ true characters and resonances. The transient attitudes play a lesser

role than the true characteristics; it is the latter which act as objective factors—whether it concerns skill

167 nationkänslan

168 Cf. Jellinek, p. 120, who in his terminology applies this definition to the nature of the nation (instead of nationality).

169 folkpsykologien

in general such as the white peoples’ advantage or talent for political dominion such as the Romans and

Great Russians against aesthetically inclined Greeks and “Lesser Russians,”170 or talent for business

such as the Chinese and Danes against Japanese and Swedes, or for the diplomatic games such as the

Englishmen against the Germans, or for technical organization such as the the Germans against the

Englishmen.

Now it is of course simpler to fix this national character in a foreigner than in a countryman,

according to the common experience that it is difficult to recognize the forest for the trees and most

difficult for one who is a tree in the forest. We who stand in the middle of our nation see in one another

firstly the constantly fluctuating individual, and do not easily glance the unified. In a foreign country

we see once again the typical, that is to say, the national. Every traveler has made this experience

abroad. It ought thereof already be clear that nationality on an objective basis unites us domestically,

even if we do not appear to always see it.

In fact, this is expressed in the spiritual area much clearer by the public opinion171, let be that the

spirit of the time adds there to the spirit of the nation as a second factor. How immovable this public

opinion is, that is first shown when one attempts to change or defy it. Many a reformer has beat his

forehead bloody against this wall. For nationality cannot permit more than a certain amount of light to

shine through at a given moment. It is grounded too deep below the soil to easily give in. And so are

nations firstly and lastly to be seen as facts, with their degree and their kind, stooped in a very slow

evolution.172 This truth—difficult to grasp for one who himself stands entirely within the national

prejudices, clearly stands out to each and every one who has not been carved this fortune—has defined

the much criticized but deeply real concept of the folk-soul173, as an expression for this factually given,

difficult-to-move, purely biological personal characteristic “jenseits von Gut und Böse”174 which paints

the concept of nationality.

III.3.4. Nations as Natural Essences

Thus even the national feeling is in itself neither good nor evil, but mighty with both of the strongest

and richest personal development as well as the blindest injustice and prejudice. The explanation lies

therein that it fundamentally is a purely natural instinct, and remains such even at high stages of

culture. This nature-boundness shows itself in very typical form in the nations’ judgments of each other

and lacking perspective on themselves. The Englishman condemns with the deepest tone of conviction

the “German Mickel,” against whose backwardness and brutality his own purity shines so clear. From

the other side sounds the answer in public outrage about the “perfidious Albion,” which stands in the

way of the German righteousness shining over the earth. The American looks down on them both with

170 That is, Ukrainians, “Great Russians” meaning what is known simply as “Russians” today.

171 allmäna meningen

172 See most recently Paul Meinhold, “Staat, Kultur, und Erziehung” in Socrates, 1916, p. 325: “Es ist ganz wunderbar, wie

der Kern der Nationen trots verschiedener Blutmischung, trotz geschichtlicher Wandlungen, im letzten Grunde die

Jahrhunderte hindurch sich gleich bleibt” (“It is quite wonderful, how the core of the nations, despite various blood

mixings, despite historical transformations, ultimately remains unchanged through the centuries.”). The most common

example is the contemporary French people and the Gauls in Caesar’s description as well as the Germanics now and in

Tacitus’ time. On the other hand, refer to “Hvad vi behöva” (“What We Need”) in Natinell Samling, pp. 72-73. (author)

173 folksjälen

174 “Beyond good and evil”

disdain and finds the world in general fairly bad, with one exception: the American. The Russian

presses and oppresses with the cleanest conscience any people within reach, but does not have enough

hate and fury when the Turk permits himself any such thing. And so everywhere. It is not worth to

speak of any consequence or any reason in this world of blind condemnations and prejudices. And

similarly the talk of phariseeism and hypocrisy does not fit, for there is no act here: it is entirely

unconscious and in good faith. Nations are so made that they are not able to measure others as they

measure themselves. Why not? Because when it comes to themselves, interest comes into play; and

therewith the case becomes a different one to them!175

This is the low level of development among the peoples which is reflected

in the previously (see

I.3.) noted weaknesses of the powers’ self-awareness. When one observes the theater of history one

realizes that the nations cannot be seen as personalities in the high sense that their style of behaving is

entirely or even to the greater part determined by reason. They are to be viewed as organisms in

biological sense. The only fixed parts within them are their interests, prejudices, and instincts: the

instinct for self-preservation and growth, the will to life and the will to power. In no wise shall be

denied the presence of altruistic tendencies by the side, and they may occasionally seize the power

entirely; but they make themselves regularly present only where they do not clearly contradict the

egotistic. Self-assertion176 is the first of a sound nation’s concepts. Nations as such are fundamentally

pure natural essences, which in history do not seek objective truth and justice, but themselves and

theirs.

This diagnosis shall now be further illuminated and confirmed, when we conduct the study

genetically and trace the origin of nations. Thereon we do not need to stop by Bagehot’s great question

mark for the races and simple indication of the imitation instinct177 (with respect to predecessors) of the

tribe. We turn ourselves directly to history, for this process has taken place before its eyes.

III.4. Emergence of Nations

In reality we see it in one direction contemporarily and that at the greatest scale. Already in The Great

Powers of 1905 I indicated the United States as the stage of a new nation’s birth to the world. The

theater has not gone further than the act in which all of the elements are each on their own readily

apparent, thrown there by the Earth’s greatest migration onto a pre-existing Anglo-Saxon bottom; we

see the new elements grow and multiply and fill the soil out there, while the original core (in the states

of New England) stagnates by reduced nativity; we see them at the same time slowly dissolve into the

culture-form in place, though not without contributing to a transformation thereof; thus they gradually

sink into the mass which therewith gains a new color, which by the completion of times—when

immigration has taken normal dimensions, so that the elements gain more fixed relations—must stand

out as a new folk-substance or nation. Much like the minerals in a rock type they have molten together

into a unit, and this unit is unique, similar to no other.

175 This section was written before the World War and published in Political Essays II, p. 130. What we experienced in the

same direction during the war surpasses all imagination and tempts occasionally to surrender all hope for nations’ sense

of truth and justice. Cf. Steffen, Krig och kultur (War and Culture), I, 1914, pp. 107-. (author)

176 själfhäfdelsen

177 efterhärmningsdriften

It is a clear natural process of assimilation by direct blood-mixing. When we now think back to

the genealogies of nations (see III.2.1.), it strikes us that this is a common feature. Armed by the

magnifying glass of history, we see thus at an earlier time in Europe the same picture as in America.

Thus there was no Englishman one thousand (or more) years ago; on the island of Albion, Celtic tribes

crowded together with German and Scandinavians, as well as remnants of the Roman invasion, soon

also new continental elements from Normandy; all of these—perhaps each on their own substantially

mixed already—folk-substances have over the course of time been welded into the fixed and strong

type which we now see on the island, and only the linguist and the researcher of customs may with

strained eyes recognize the elements. Here the end has therefore long come to that process which in the

United States has recently begun. And so everywhere: these clear nationalities around us are dissolved

by genetic investigations into a mosaic of smaller ethnic elements which once had relative freedom,

which perhaps in places still preserve this freedom, but which in this country have been cooked into a

single fully organic entity.

But the theater on America’s soil has sill a great interest therein that it concerns an already

complete nation’s transformation into one new. It is the second time in a few centuries that this

continent sees a new nation being born: first it was the emigrated Englishmen that there transformed

into Anglo-Americans by the transplantation itself within the new soil, under the power of a new nature

and new cultural purposes.

We learn here to know another, simpler method for the birth of nations, which naturally is active

in the previous but may also work alone. It is the acclimatization process or the for all life valid law of

adaption: rectification according to the environment. Already on a surface-level consideration, this law

makes itself relevant also to the people. The modern “anthropogeography” has put particular effort into

publicizing these influences of the nature itself. They are observed also from other directions: to use

two eminent world-historical examples, we recall Oldenbreg’s connection of the Hindu’s pantheism

and the Nirvana teaching with the hot climate of the Gagnes valley, where all fixed contours move

away into formlessness, and likewise of Auler Paschas178 testimony that he has never understood

Judea’s predisposition for the highest form of religiosity better than when he one quiet night saw the

stars in its area in wonderful greatness, as if approaching the earth.179 When such influences with

striking truth have been shown for the innermost human soul-life, then we may also understand how a

geographer such as Kirchoff could present the natural territory essentially as a sort of casting mold,

where different human elements are cast to hom*ogeneous masses,180 naturally under strong dependence

of the natural form.

Now, it is not Kirchoff’s meaning that this influence is only external and direct. He has an open

eye and places great weight on the indirect influence by the nature’s pointers to economic life and

exchange. Thus he finds this circulating production and consumption along natural trade routes be a

decisive factor to the connection and cohesion of citizens in Switzerland and Belgium.181 Without doubt

this is a significant remark, and it ought to be widened to apply to the entire historical coexistence, the

178 General Carl Lorenz Auler (1854-1930).

179 Oldenberg, Buddha, ed. 1914, pp. 12-13. Auler Pascha, Die Hedschesbahni, “Petermanns Mitteilungen,” 1906,

Ergänzungsheft n:o 154, p. 6. (author)

180 Kirchoff, Mensch und Erde, 1901, p. 93, Nation und Nationalität, p. 11. One almost gets into a superstitious mood when

one hears that the American has begun taking the Indian’s facial features! (author)

school of nations where their beginnings are educated by upbringing. The cultural environment—

interaction with neighbors not the least—turns here to the natural environment; this not only for the

material sector, but up to its customs and literature and the spiritual exchange of thoughts in all of its

forms. That this coexistence ultimately is the strongest element in the weaving of nations ought not be

doubted; but when Jellinek considers them on this basis to be only historical-social formations and not

natural, he overlooks the foundation and roots and presents as a contrast that which is a supplement, to

a certain level even a causal relationship.

Only in one case can Jellinek’s diagnosis be considered a hit, and that is where natiogenesis

occurs without exchange of soil. Such is the case in the recently mentioned Belgium and Switzerland,

where, though, no new language bears witness of the new nation’s full maturity. Thus the case is more

typical in Portugal and Netherlands. Nature alone could not by seashore and river mouths turn these

Spanish and Low German branches into their own national tribes if the states had not closed the doors

around them (2/3 and 1/3 of a millennium

5 “Statskunskapens objekt”

6 Political-scientific professorial chair held by the Kjellén.

entire body of work. It is intended to be the introduction to a world which for too many of my

compatriots is foreign: namely, the surrounding political reality. We have as a people the tendency to

laugh at all types of “idealism,” which at the root is hardly more than an over-cultivated or tired

nation’s inclination to dream itself away from a tiresome and unpretty reality. We have sacrificed at

such altars for long enough. It is time to wake up. It is beginning to turn into a question of life and

death to no longer wear fancy blindfolds before our eyes in a time that is hard for every man, but

hardest for the blind. Therefore, it is a simple and necessary civic duty for each and everyone who has

eyes and can see to bear witness of what he sees. But the witness’s availability then does not need to be

hindered by the abstract and schematic formal treatment that is considered necessary for a true

scientific handbook.

In systematic respect, this book will therefore only do the rough work: to establish the

introductory foundation and erect the frame. More careful construction of the system may come in

continued works of experimental nature. May the system be tried on the concrete state-formations

before it is definitely abstracted from them. As the work on the Great Powers came before this book, it

is the intent that a work on the paternal state (Political Handbooks IV) is to come before a final

summary of the system.

Uppsala, November 1916.

Rudolf Kjellén.

Introduction

On the Self-Reflection of the Political Science

“There comes in the course of development of every science a moment where it stops, as if to catch its

breath and come to its senses, where a self-trial emerges and a challenge must come to stand. In that

moment, the method comes into question.”

With these words, a Finnish researcher has recently begun an investigation into the “problems

of ethnology.”7 These are no less valid for political science. Even this science needs, no doubt, a

moment of self-reflection, as its afterthought seeks its way back to the problem statement itself, to the

science’s source point and object. And a determined sense tells us that the time has now arrived, as the

great public crisis manifests before the world a change of course for the state-thought with respect to

the sphere of individual interests.

Practical-pedagogical viewpoints play here besides the purely theoretical ones. It is an often

heard statement—not to mention a recognized truth—that political talent does not belong to the virtues

with which a generous nature has equipped our Swedish people. We do not need to look further than

the opposite shore of Öresund to feel our weakness in this area. It is, besides, related to the lack of

interest in the merchant profession, which is often shown to us; behind both lies, namely, as a common

root, an underdeveloped sense for psychological realities. Our history has always been richer in war

heroes than statesmen; and even as the former’s race died out for lack of demand, the latter’s does not

seem to have meaningfully multiplied.

Is it thus a coincidence that the study of politics also has a low-priority role within our

education? Does this not stand in correspondence, as both result and cause, with the indicated national

characteristics? In any event, this is a startling fact. Long has it looked as if specifically the civic

knowledge has among us been considered to fall entirely outside the school’s field of purpose; even

after the royal education reforms of 1906, it has no other place than the back pocket of the teaching of

history. On university level, its emancipation has been achieved in organization, but hardly in rank:

when the 1907 bylaw on philosophical exams for public office candidates institutes an upper class of

so-called main subjects, we find history among six languages and six natural sciences, but no political

science. Certainly this will one day be seen as a literally classic example of the human bondage to

traditions, how even in the 20th century, our country—at the same time as we were preparing to,

through universal suffrage, draw the entire people into immediate responsibility for its fate—

considered knowledge of an extinct Greek language to be more important for Swedish education than

knowledge of the political world which lives around us and of our own societal forms. It is as if

national weaknesses are to be conserved, instead of overcome.

Now it is clear that our neglected place is also connected to a certain suspicion of theories

regarding the state-life, natural for a democratic age. In no field is the time so uneager to recognize the

great free-thinker’s word and experience; to think free is great, but to think right is greater! It is easy to

be suspicious of a science’s claim to think correctly about a subject, when the time foremostly wants to

think and act freely.

7 Wikman in Nya Argus, 16/3, p. 53 (author)

But if the political science has ultimately not gained its full right either as a subject of general

public education or as part in the sequence of academic examinations, then we add to that perhaps

another reason outside of the psychological properties of nation and time. This reason I see in the

official understanding of the science’s own object and the thereto fitted organization of its teaching.

According to this understanding, the state8 is primarily and in principle a subject of justice; what

constitutes its meaning is its law and nothing more; the study of the state becomes, as a consequence, a

pure and exclusive study of the law9. Now, though, this subject is already covered by the studies of

state justice10 within the juridical faculty. The humanistic study of the state has sought separation and

desired to mark an independent nature by placing its perspective in the historical developments or the

metaphysical expressions, but has therewith only wandered into other sciences’ legal domains, those of

history and (practical) philosophy. As a hybrid of these three, a pure in-between and transitional form,

without any own central point and without any natural boundaries in either direction, political science

has thus attempted a difficult presence in the scientific community. Should we then wonder, how it, in

the educated opinion, has failed to win the attention which justly is reserved only to independent

sciences with their own objects and own methods? Such a political science cannot attract the public and

the students with the full power of the educational value that should be expected of its great object; it

must, in contrast, through its abstract and formalistic inclination directly repel a people to whose

character, according to the erudite G. Sundbärg, also belongs a justified opposition to all judicial

confusions and lawyering.

It should therefore be established that the traditional understanding of the science’s own object

has not acted to give the political science what belongs to it in this country. Before, however, we place

the blame on the science’s own domestic maintainers as an independent fault, we should not forget that

they in this case only represent the general understanding, even in the so-called great cultural countries.

That the state is a fact of justice and the study of the state is therefore a judicial science, this has

belonged to their impressions, occupied by the entire temporal consciousness, which one since long

does not even discuss, because they appear obvious. We stand before a universal—not a national—

prejudice.

So we see Jellinek, the time’s tone-setting authority on the subject, in his Allgemeine

Staatslehre of 1900 indicate as “currently reigning” the understanding that the state is primarily a

subject of justice; and in his similarly named work of 1901

ago, respectively) and designated for them their own

historical purposes, separate from those of the main tribes; in this context, their dialects became

elevated to realm languages and thus bearers of their own literatures. The result became so fundamental

that no state-boundary in Europe is as old as Portugal’s, and that the wanderer 2 miles west of the

German Kleve finds himself in an entirely new world, in the Dutch Nijmegen.182 Here we see a unique

case of the state’s ability to create a nation, a “political acclimatization”; loyalty here has in essence

delimited nationality by external separation no less than the previously (see III.1.1.-III.1.2.) remarked

internal unification; but, evidently, neither has it here occurred without cooperation with nature, which

separates the coastal territory from the uplands.

The direct acclimatization on a foreign ground consists of adaption to a new natural

environment with therein lying new labor purposes, and is negatively reinforced by the simultaneous

liberation from the adaption to the old country. Thus the Anglo-Saxon race was developed in separate

environments on both sides of the Atlantic during the 17th and 18th centuries, and it can therefore be said

that it was already a new nation which in 1770s dissolved also the political ties to the mother tribe. It

was immigration which after the middle of the 19th century interrupted this nation’s naturally slow

development and called upon the natiogenetic process anew in order to from Anglo-Americans create

Yankeemen, now in the form of assimilation. The same double transformation has on Italy’s soil

produced first the old Romans and later the modern Italians, both times primarily through assimilation.

But acclimatization works now relatively alone in Australia, where a new Anglophone nation is being

formed, and in the same simple way have the multitude of the old tribes’ fragments emerged as

described earlier in this chapter. One is tempted to think of grafting within the realm of plants and the

reproduction by budding in lower animal life when one observes such phenomena in the world of

nations.

As long as we are able to trace the process, nations thus emerge by the amalgamation’s and

adaption’s purely biological processes. Even therein their behavior is similar to the speciation within

181 See here Kirchoff, Mensch und Erde, p. 81, Nation und Nationalität, pp. 17-18, 27-28, 37, 41, Neuman, p. 68, Ratzel,

Die Erde und das Leben II, 675. (author)

182 See Kirchoff, N. u. N., pp. 18-20, 22, also M. u. E., pp. 78, 82; Treitschke, Politik (1897), p. 277; Karl Menne, Die

Entwicklung der Nederländer zur Nation, 1903. On the part of the state in the shaping of the nation, see Neuman, pp.

99, 102, 130.

the lower organic world, in that it does not appear to be a permanent, continuing event, but with a

preference for certain breaking times. Most current European nations trace themselves to such an event

in the older middle ages. They have emerged sporadically to then stand fast, certainly under a steady

assimilation and acclimatization and with an increasing gravity of the higher cultural influences, just as

humans themselves slowly transform over the course of their lives after they first take a personality.

III.5. Maturity of Nations

Now the most significant question remains: when can a natiogenetic process be considered complete,

so that the nation has been born to personhood? The answer may be sought in both an objective and a

subjective direction.

The first one reads: when the ethnicity in question has developed a common and own language.

Here the connection between between nationality and language appears in a new light, as cause and

effect. When therefore the acclimatization had reached that point when the Low German tongue could

be presented as Dutch and the Castilian as Portuguese, then we posses a certain sign that the new

nations have broken away. Likewise so when assimilation on the British peninsula around year 700

created a common Old English tongue, in order to through a reawakening of the process by the end of

the Middle Ages transition to a more Modern English. It is equally the sharpest and quickest instrument

given to an all the more internal closure in that the door is opened for a written language above the

dialects, with the entire spiritual traffic of literature as consequence.

The emergence of the language does not always keep an even step with the approach of national

maturity; the American English has not yet differentiated itself as more than a dialect, and the Swiss

nation stands clear as a day with no apparent need for an independent language. But if this diagnostic

therefore occasionally betrays—and is always chronologically floating, difficult to fix to an exact point

in time—then the other, subjective, stands fixed. So sounds the answer to our question: when the nation

becomes conscious of its own individuality, its co-belonging internally and distinction externally. And

hereby we have reached the central point of this investigation.

We must, namely, observe that the nations just as human children are for long unconscious of

their existence. The individual members dwell still in their kin-, or village-, or estate circles, and do not

feel themselves co-belonging against other nations to the degree that this feeling becomes a particular

source of power. But ultimately it happens that solidarity becomes such a force in their souls; and this

experience can come momentarily, like when an electric tension collected over a long time discharges

itself or a spark breaks out in blazes.

Typically this happens as consequence of a hard external pressure; it is in need that a nation

learns to know itself. The people of Sweden, thereto separated into provincial groups, learned this in

Engelbrekt’s183 time under Danish oppression. France’s broken and despairing ranks felt the same

experience at the same time, when the maiden from Orléans raised her banner against the Englishmen.

History then recorded the thus unleashed force as its strongest, dearest, and most mysterious. Before its

court it and it alone is evidence of a true birth among the peoples.

183 Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson, early 15th century Swedish rebel against the Kalmar Union.

When this consciousness to as limbs enter a higher or greater personhood first grasps a nation,

than this nation truly has “become a man.”184 On this point the process becomes political. For the nation

which feels itself in the age of majority will also be recognized as such. It desires to explode the

established state-system if it has no space therein. It desires to, as sovereign, be in equal standing with

the system’s preceding members. It demands its confirmation in the shape of a state. The form of this

demand, again, is typically a declaration of independence. It was this development which led the Dutch

to 23 January 1579, Americans to 4 July 1776, Norwegians to 17 May 1814 and 7 June 1905,

Bulgarians to 5 October 1908.

III.5.1. The Nationality Principle

The form of being as state constitutes therefore the terminal point of the nation’s longing for life. First

then does it also in the exterior become distinct from the others. Now it may feed its loyalty from the

source of loyalty and the work of the entire state power. But there is something even deeper that is

gained here. By the state the nation gains higher spiritual content which it lacks in itself. Its blind

instincts attain by the state a bridle in the rational ideas of justice. Its natural power has entered the

higher state of consciousness which accompanies the rational form. Under the enticing light of freedom

it has bound itself to a historical responsibility.

This is the content of the nationality principle185, one of the greatest ideas that has ever

dominated a time-turning. It is not old in history; it has not played any role in the formation of states

prior to the

middle of the 19th century. For if the nations themselves are old, their conscious claims on

political individuality are young. The ancient time knew nothing of it; it dealt in Greece with political

microcosms which never were able to realize a national unity, and in Rome with a dominating

macrocosm over allies and subjects of various nationalities. The medieval—thereto counted the age of

the absolute monarchy—took just as little note of the reality of nations; it made no difference within its

dominions whether they were mixed from several ethnic groups or not. Nor had the science noticed this

case; Montesquieu still knew nothing of the nationality’s state-forming power and right. For the natural

law no intermediate forms or degrees existed between the individuals and their sum of humanity; it

built its states of abstract human types, average proportions of French-German-Englishman, and so on,

and these individuals inflated it then to the true moving force of evolution—it saw no one else as the

protagonist of history.

This theory has been weighed on history’s own scales and found too simple. It took a human

shape in the fatherlandless Corsican Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon denotes the individual’s giant

attempt to embrace the world in his own name, with no idea behind himself: with no nation around

himself, and likewise no God above himself. This transgression was necessary, this overextension of

the individual, for the nationalities in general to awaken. It was by them and only by them—on Spain’s,

Germany’s, and Russia’s downtrodden and again restored national consciousness—that the giant fell.

And then a political discovery was made greater than any since Christianity’s discovery of the

individual: there is another personhood in history, and this person is the nation. It was as when the other

actor entered the wagon of Thespis: the theater could begin with a deepened meaning. But the nation is

184 “Vorden en man”

185 nationalitetsprincipen

again the greater out of the two. The individual is not the master, but the tool. The nation, not the

individual, is the true hero of history.186

This understanding lies as seed already in Fichte’s speech “an die deutsche Nation,” held 1807

in Berlin with company of the drumbeats of the French occupation outside the hall.187 It was

exaggerated to one-sidedness by the Historical School. It was then infringed against by the diplomats at

the Congress of Vienna, who did not consider it necessary to give regard thereto on their new political

map (Holland-Belgium united, Italy and Germany kept in fragments). It was condemned in 1849 still in

a pastoral letter from the Synod of Vienna as “a remnant of heathendom.”188 It was the legitimacy and

the ancien régime who stood as judge here. As late as 1863, this denunciation was seconded from the

other direction, with the motive of the French Revolution’s individualism, by Jolv.189 But then the

nationality principle was already proclaimed (1851) as Mancini’s “sacred and divine cause” (santa e

divina cosa), on which he in his famous letures “Della nazionalità come fondamento del diritto delle

gente" wished to build the entire international law. It was the new Italy’s spiritual call to service. Under

French step-parenthood (Napoleon III), the idea had now emerged as a world-historical motive in rising

action, and would since then not exit the stage.

III.5.2. Consequences of the Nationality Principle

It is clear that the nationality principle will in practice act in two ways: as a centrifugal force, where

several nations under one state have longed for freedom, but also as centripetal, where different states

of the same nation have longed for unity. It is thus one and the same force behind on the one hand the

Balkan peoples’ liberation and on the other hand the unifications of Italy and Germany. We see it also

to a lesser degree in Holstein’s (and Elsass’s) return home to Germany and Eastern Rumelia to

Bulgaria. In reality it lies behind as good as all border changes that have occurred on the map of Europe

in the last half-century. It is not to wonder that an idea, which has fulfilled such great works, becomes

regarded as a warden tree in politics between peoples. Thus, now that the entente has gathered itself

behind a program for the peace after the World War, the nationality idea is its declared primary motive:

the new Europe shall now be founded entirely on the principle of peoples’ right to unity and peace.190

There are namely significant gaps before the full implementation of the idea. If we look closer,

we find on the map of Europe three types of sins thereagainst: (A) unity without liberty, as the Czechs

in Austria and Irish in England; (B) liberty without unity, as in Italy with its outlying countrymen in

Austria and Switzerland, among others, Romania with its in Hungary and Russia, Serbia with its in

186 Cf. Rudolph Sohm’s stellar lecture on “Die Gegensätze unserer Zeit,” 1883. (author)

187 Kirchoff, Nation, pp. 9-10. Hans Larsson, op. cit., pp. 106-. (author)

188 The differentiation of languages was at the same time denoted as “a consequence of sin and fall from God”; see

Neuman, p. 96. (author)

189 Joly, Du Principe des Nationalités. See in particular p. 36: “Ce n’est pas parce qu’ils sont de telle ou telle race que des

hommes ne peuvent ètre forcés d’obéir qu’aux lois qu’ils se sont volontairement données, c’est tout simplement parce

qu’ils sont hommes et conséquemment libres.” C.f. pp. 33-34, where the idea of nationality is presented as a confusion

between the people’s idea, which includes rights, and that of the race, which cannot have any, because it is not a

juridical person. Note also Quatre-fa*ges’ categorical verdict “Toute repartition politique, fondée sur ethnologie, est

absurde,” quoted by Kirchoff, Mensch und Erde, p. 94. (author)

190 See Political Problems of the World War (Världskrigets politiska problem), pp. 60-61. Note further Asquith’s speech 6/8

1914, “we fight to defend the principle that the small nations shall not be crushed,” and Lloyd George’s words, “this is a

war of nationalities.” (author)

Austria-Hungary; (C) neither liberty nor unity, such as the 33 million Ukrainians in Russia and Austria-

Hungary and the 20 million Poles in Russia, Austria, and Germany.191 But practical politics have also

on all of these points had to count with more-or-less mean conflicts. It is the correlation between the

Italian “irredentism’s” grasping after Trento and Trieste, the Serbian’s after Bosnia and other territories,

the Romanian’s after Siebenbürgen, the Bulgarian’s after Macedonia, and so on; the same secret lies

behind the Irish and Czech stamping against their states’ unities as behind Polish and Ukrainian dreams

of liberty. The crimes against the nationality principle no less than the crimes against nature appear

therefore in everyday experience as open wounds within the state-system (see II.3.2.). He does not

allow himself to be suppressed or silenced. As an imperative, more categorical and less accessible to

rational critique than any other, he stands for the statesmen in countries with “irridenta,” and similarly

for the heroes of liberty from nations which live under other nations’ rule and care.

The power of this requirement becomes clear by a single word. The nationality principle is no

less than the personality principle192 in its application to the national personalities, with its eternal truth

and eternal limitation. In a sudden clarifying light we see already here that it is a child of the same

spirit as the universal suffrage within the nations. The great force stems from the same source. It is the

“national value” which wants to claim its right also politically and socially on the greater stage, just as

the human value of the individual on the lesser.

III.5.3. Opponents of the Nationality Principle

We may now understand that the nationality principle ran and still in certain directions runs

much

resistance. In purposeful action, this reaction shows itself in such phenomena of the regimental politics

such as russification, magyarization, and germanization, all aimed against foreign minorities in the

name of a ruling majority and therefore of loyalty, all aiming to by violent method make the national

unit complete at the cost of the nationality idea on the domestic elements’ the account. We find thus on

this hostile path also Germany, ever since it in the name of the great idea solved its own problem of

unity; and we find at the spearhead of the most extensive reaction (against Poles in the east) the same

great statesman who was the man of the nation during its work of unity.193 That Austria too must be part

of the reaction, let be by different means, is a clear work of this state’s own self-preservation instinct:

where loyalty is not carried by any nation, there the nationality idea automatically means dissolution.

One cannot avoid seeing a connection between these practical politics and the new state-

teachings which positively react against the nationality principle. This is no longer the muted voices of

ancien régime and revolution, this is the greatest contemporary authorities, and now foremostly in

Germany and Austria-Hungary. Thus Treitschke labels our principle as one of the natural law’s most

broken abstractions; Ratzel sees therein a return to un-territorial politics (“Rückschritt ins

191 See the full exploration in Political Problems of the World War, pp. 71-95. The different types of irridenta are

systematized in the German edition of the same work, Die polit. Probleme des Weltkriegs, pp. 55-56. (author)

192 personlighetsprincipen

193 It is therefore not difficult to find the Ariadne thread in the “gymnastics by which a righteous German defender of

nationality invents Polish and Slesvigan exception rules” (Hans Larsson, p. 109); it is simply loyalty which seizes

power on the basis of a satisfied, dominant nationality. Objectively seen, germanization and similar phenomena may be

understood as another expression of the nationality principle itself, when one namely understands the principle as

signifying identity of state and nation, regardless of the means by which this is attained. Germanization has the same

aims—a nationally united and purified realm—as, for example, the Polish national movement. (author)

Unterritoriale”); Kirchoff denotes “sound states” as “real interest-communities,” and not “ethnological

nation-states”; Meinecke demands that “Staatsverband muss über Volkverband gehen”194; and Sieger

gives the “nationality-state” forged from several nations preference before the nation-state as a “guide

to a better future.” It has gone all the way to the point where one welcomes the World War as a

liberating action which shall entirely put an end to the national and racial idea as a state-forming power

(Potthoff).195 In general one can see in the right-wing parties, with their strong focus on the state power,

a special resonance with this standpoint, while the modern left stands more determined on the idea as a

whole.

In my work on the political problems of the World War, I have sought to make justice between

these two opposed perspectives and take them over in a synthesis. It is conceded to the deniers of the

nationality principle that the principle cannot make itself valid alone and absolutely. On the one hand it

has its limitation in the demands of the state-system, where the new member is to have its place; here

must without doubt certain guarantees be placed, such as the citizen’s participation in the active state-

community, guarantees of both negative (no pressures) as well as positive (contribution to the cultural

work) sort, as will be shown below in a separate connection (below, ch. 5); here respect must be paid to

certain other political necessities, such as the geopolitical. On the other hand, the nationality principle

does not prevent a political connection within a higher circle, such as the Magyars’ in the Habsburg

monarchy or the Germans’ in a Mitteleuropa, so long as the nations’ unity and autonomous liberty

within the circle is preserved196. The nation state is not though of as the final word of history. Though

this does not exclude that the word in its right place is solid and worthy of reception.

A deeper and possibly more common attack against the nationality principle comes from those

who like Hans Larsson regard them as a transient attitude, comparable to the religious fanaticism of the

16th and 17th centuries and determined to in time move to a plane other than the political 197. There is

much of this interpretation also in Vitalis Norström, when he places the “cultural state”198 against the

194 “State community must come before national community.”

195 Treitschke, pp. 270, 280; Ratzel, Pol. Geographie, p. 35; Kirchoff, Mensch und Erde, p. 94; Meinecke, Die deutsche

Erhebung, p. 80; Sieger, “Der öst. Staatsgedanke und das deutsche Volk” in Zeitschr. für Politik, 1916, p. 19; Potthoff,

Volk und Staat, 1915, p. 8. C.f. Hasse’s distinction of “Völkerstaat” (popular state) and “Nationalstaat” (nation-state) as

two sound formations, Das Deutsche Reich als Nationalstaat, 1905, p. 14. (author)

196 See the restrictions by the proclamation of the principle in The Problems of the World War, pp. 62-70. In his critique

(“Probleme des Weltkriegs,” Die neue Rundschau, 1916) Meinecke follows to the point where I regard that “das

apriorische Recht der Nation reicht bis zur Einheit, aber nicht bis zur Suveränitet” (“The a priori right of the nation is

sufficient for unity, but not sovereignty”; German ed. p. 54); here our understandings diverge in that Meinecke believes

that the a priori right ends even earlier, by “Bürgerschaft der Existenz—das Recht auf freie geistige Bewegung und

Entfaltung ihrer geistigen Kraft und Eigenart” (“Citizenship of existence—the right of free spiritual movement and

development of their spiritual power and distinct qualities”; p. 727); as an example he gives the Germans in Austria-

Hungary. I understand this standpoint within the circ*mstances of peace; but how does it stand in war, in the

aforementioned example between Germany and Austria-Hungary? Shall it then not show itself unstable by placing

Germans on either side against each other? Thus the Meineckan understanding requires necessarily a supplement, that

the possibility of war is decoupled from the circ*mstances, that is to say that at least an international-legal connection is

erected. Under these absolute circ*mstance, I have nothing opposed to Meinecke’s arguments, and recognize that my

standpoint must be expanded. (author)

197 Ideer och makter (Ideas and Powers), pp. 112-13. (author)

198 kulturstaten

“national just state”199200. The popular belief likely corresponds with this understanding that the

contemporary intimate communications are on the route to slay the nationalities in favor of

cosmopolitan gatherings.

III.5.4. Guarantors of the Nationality Principle

Hereon it may be noted that the view appears to bear witness of a pure illusion. One overlooks that the

modern means of communication connect not only nations with one another, but also individuals within

one nation, and that the latter circulation is significantly more meaningful than the former. It is as the

relationship between foreign and domestic trade; the former is easier to see, catches the eye, but not

even England’s circulation of over 20 billion with other countries gets even close to the circulation at

home on the island. One further overlooks the spiritual circulation right in our time through the national

press, built on the general literacy which is guaranteed by the national school. If we add the modern

state’s regular attributes of general conscription duty and universal suffrage, then it is even clearer that

forces are now in motion which more than in all previous times make possible a grasping

of the

nationality; and one shall easier understand the historical fact that out of the nations’ struggle for

presence, by natural selection, lines all the more firm and pure have emerged, surrounding the distinct

nations.

Shall we need to strengthen the last judgment by a comparison between, for example, the

cultural nations of Europe and the natural peoples201 of Africa? It is evident, that the nations of our time

precisely strive to consolidate themselves into their own idiosyncrasies, tighten themselves around their

own types, at the same time as they each make their contributions to the common work of the cultural

circle. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly clear that the understanding is breaking through,

according to which nationality is in reality a creation of our time. “First the contemporary extended

schooling, the expanded public education in general, and the possibility of an extensive thought

exchange induced by the great development of communications and the press, even among the wider

strata, have prepared ground for this assimilated mass which we call nation,” says Neumann (p. 95).

There is no doubt that a Swedish nation has existed since heathen times, and that it in the old

times had the same task of unity as Italy and Germany do now, until it almost 600 years ago was

gathered together under an own, shared law; but a closer observation shall without doubt give that its

real national consciousness has not been a living power even in its greatest time. It was loyalty which

led the people of Sweden during its world-historical purpose: a strong sense of state, better fixed as

faith in king supported by the strong bonds of the state church on the other side; thereto came in the

higher classes without doubt a great national ambition, but in the common man there surely was more

of a sense of home and native village than internal solidarity. Only sporadically, such as during the

Engelbrekt uprising, does the real national sense appear to have broken forth; otherwise it lied latently

within the objective circ*mstances of the nation, and it was only our time—of the public school, the

newspapers, the the railroads and the conscription—that is first capable of definitively extracting it202.

199 nationell rättsstat [Rechtsstaat].

200 Radikalismen är en gång (Radicalism is once), pp. 62-. (author)

201 kulturnationer, naturfolk

202 Cf. “The Perishability of States and Nations” (“Staters och nationers förgänglighet”), 1908, collected in Polit. Essays I,

p. 6: “It was in the name of loyalty, state-sense more than that of nationality that it [the Swedish people] made its

But the nationality principle has its true and lasting guarantee not of its own power, but thereof

that it meets and marries another force of no lesser value or weight. This counter-current is the state’s

longing for a living sensual content. As much as there is a current from the nation to the state—we have

now sufficiently observed this—there is also a current from the state to the nation. In the former case,

the initiative belongs to the nation which seeks to idealize its nationality as loyalty. In the latter, the

state is the primary and leader to make loyalty materialize as nationality. The former is a movement

upwards from below, the latter downwards from above. But both carry the same aim: the nation-state,

where people and nation coincide in one space, enclosed within one state.

So we see here the loyalty principle as a road on the right side collide with and feed into the

nationality principle. We find ultimately no difference between “state-nations” and “culture-

nations”203204; they fall together in the end. Shall one now perhaps understand the width and depth of

the necessity which in our time has let nations and states find each other, who thus far in history have

wandered separate roads, as if seeking each other? It is not only the nation which strives for a spirit. It

is also the state that seeks a soul. At the same time the nation gains of the state a rational rein, at the

same time it grants the state back the pulsating sensual life and its living unity, which no earthly form

of presence can be without if it seeks to achieve personhood.

III.5.5. The Law of Ethnic Individuation

The idea of the modern state lies deepest in this connection between the nation’s natural essence and

the states’ desire for reason. There, its inner character of a lifeform is reflected most clearly. There, the

character of this lifeform is also reflected: not pure instinct, nor abstract justice either, but a synthesis of

both. The pure light of justice will break in a national temper much like light breaks in an atmosphere,

and arrives to its place in history only by the way of this refraction.

Geopolitics have taught us that the modern state obeys the law of geographical individuation,

the ideal of which is a natural country for a body. What we have now seen in the nationality principle is

the law of ethnic individuation, whose aim is a natural people and its soul. They are innermostly one

and the same desire for nature and organic life. Thus, much like the natural country or realm has natural

territory and natural borders, the natural people or the nation also has its cohesion and its separation

from others. And thus, much like the state itself can participate in its territory’s independent

development, it may contribute to that of the nationality by reinforcing it with loyalty; but in either

case, it cannot avoid the need for a basic form of objective circ*mstances. In this connection it is

clearer than ever that the personhood idea of the nation no less than that of the individual is a definitive

conquest of and for the humanity.

There is, as already noted and as is evident in and of itself, no question of absolute demand.

Nature does not have borders in sufficient proportion (see II.4.4.), nor do the nations lie as fragmented

and fixed as “the different glass cases in a museum collection” (Treitschke); they are to a certain degree

greatest deed.” See a further development in “Commemorative Speech for Carl X Gustaf” (“Minnestal öfver Carl X

Gustaf”), Göteb. Aftonblad 16/2 1910, as well as in speech on “The Heart of Sweden” (“Sveriges hjärta”), held in

Skansen 1/5 1910 and published in Vår Lösen 1914, I rediscover this point of view very clearly in Gustav Sundbärg in

Folklynnet och utvandringen (The Mindset of the People and Emigration), 1911, pp. 25-26. (author)

203 statnationer, kulturnationer

204 See thereon Treitschke, p. 271, Kirchoff, pp. 52-, Meinecke, Weltbürgertum, pp. 2-3. Boëthius, p. 135. (author)

elastic bodies; they may occasionally (Macedonia) not even be completed; they may also voluntarily or

by “evacuation” of the state change location, so that a bad border may be purified (the Turks’ outflow

from the lost areas of the Balkan peninsula205). Nor is it an entirely unmixed benefit to posses such

absolutely pure borders. But that evolution moves in the direction of such relative fixedness in country

and people, this is already seen in that Western Europe, which has the most mature states, also has the

purest nations. Only there—if we thereto also count Scandinavia—do we have clear nation-states of

greater than 90% unity. Even if politics have produced polyglottic states there in Belgium and

Switzerland (and Elsass-Lothringen), in the friction zones between the races, the maturity is then

shown therein that the national borders within these states are fixed: the desire for growth with the

consequent struggle for space has diminished. Particularly enlightening evidence is here borne by the

Jews, who in Eastern Europe are “unfalsified Orientals” and therefore also counted as their own nation,

while they in the West stand out as fully naturalized, as if baked into the nationality in place (for

example, Lord Beaconsfield206).

The state’s and culture’s participation in the purely national concentration

stands out strongly in

this increased capability for assimilation. It is as an old and happy marriage; nation and state have as

husband and wife grown together into a whole personhood—but the presumption is therefore their

original and eternal distinction in nature.

III.6. The Problem of Race

Before we leave this primary problem of ethnopolitics—concerning the relationship between people

and nation—we ask ourselves whether not also the race stands as a state-forming factor of greater

scope. The question can only be answered by empirical observation, the result of which is with reason

negative.

Geopolitics have arguably shown us a political block formation in the European as well as the

American state-system; but neither Mitteleuropa nor Panamerica have any at all connection to ethnic

elements; the former seeks to unite separate races, such as Germanics, Slavs, Finns, and Turks, and the

latter seeks to bridge the continent’s207 decisive racial antithesis and unite Germanics (along with other

components of the Yankee blood) with Romans. Here, geography has a complete advantage over

ethnography. If one later observes Japan’s freedom from Mongolic prejudices in their policy toward

China, and adds the shipwreck of pan-Slavism in the World War, one becomes somewhat disinclined to

highly appraise the influence of race.

205 See hereon Political Problems of the World War, pp. 67-69 and literature cited therein, also Meinecke’s critique, op. cit.,

p. 726; c.f. Tretschke, p. 271. (author)

206 So already in 1884 by Brachelli in Statistik der Staaten Europas; see Neuman, p. 89, and Treitschke, p. 276. Of

Beaconsfield as a national representative, see Oscar Schmitz outstanding work on Die Kunst der Politik, 1914.—One

has also presented the Jewish tribe within ethnopolitics also in a different case, namely as evidence that history places a

higher value on a certain mixture of races than on racial purity—Jews are at the same time the purest and the least

natiogenetic among nations. Treitschke, p. 279, Ratzel, Erde und Leben, p. 675. (author)

207 världsdel. In Swedish, as in certain other European languages, there are two distinct concepts which are both typically

interpreted as continent in English: kontinent and världsdel (“part of the world,” Ger.: Erdteil). The former concept

typically counts Eurasia as a single continent, while Europe and Asia are always distinct “world parts”; North and South

America are usually distinct continents (kontinenter), but may be the same “world part.”

Nonetheless, it would be all too hurried to entirely strike the problem from this chapter on this

basis. While race thus far has not made itself politically relevant, there has been no lack of attempts

thereto, of greater or smaller degree and kind.

Thus, the Pan-America program has without doubt a spiritual obstacle to overcome precisely in

the racial and cultural antithesis, and this obstacle has taken a political form in the so-called A-B-C

alliance between Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, which entered great politics with its mediation between

U.S.A. and Mexico. Here lies at the bottom a Romance unit, and from here the perspective moves to

the Latin America as a unit on the basis of race contra the Germanic north thereabout. The perspective

intersects others, foremostly the pan-Iberian, which has even held congresses (in Madrid 1900, 1904; a

reflective effect of U.S.A.’s war with Spain of 1898); here enters the historic moment, the bond

between “motherland” and daughter nations across the world seas; Spain is thus a participant, and the

program has been presented as a “Greater Spain”208. On our side of the Atlantic, we find hence the race

thought active on the Pyrenean peninsula in the form of the Iberian Federation to which the entire

Latin America connects itself as an ethnic and historical annex. But it does not even stop there, but

widens itself to finally to the program of the Latin Union—the dream of Frenchman Victor Hugo,

Italian Mazzini, Spanish Castelar—where the Romance race-thought is finally realized in a state bloc

of over 100 million in Europe alone! Thus far it has not taken practical contours more than in a

discussion of a Latin toll union (as counterweight to the German) a few man-ages ago; Portugal is not a

part within its only real fruit, the Latin Monetary Union of 1865. Nor did Spain take the side of its

racial brethren in the World War, and Portugal’s participation clearly depends less on racial community

than on the political pressure of England. This aside, one cannot avoid noting in favor of the racial

thought the fact that Italy in 1915 and Romania in 1916 were driven out of their treaties’ bonds with the

Central Powers into the camp of the Entente.

Pan-Slavism too has in the conclusions of the World War shown itself to not be entirely without

fruits, even if it as a unifying racial thought has been bankrupted with the defection of Bulgaria, the

emancipation of Poland, and the Austrian peoples’ loyalty in general. It has, though, not been without

effect on the Czechs in Bohemia nor the Ruthenians in Galicia; and its impression on the people of the

Serbs did in reality set the avalanche of the war in motion. The significance of pan-Slavism lies in these

effects on the smaller peoples, not in the Russian initiative; it is they who made it into a world-political

factor more than any other instance of the racial thought—even though one ought not be blind to

catalytic moments from other directions209.

The smallest practical effect of the racial thought has been found where the race itself held the

highest place. Pan-Germanism certainly put a fruit full of vital force in the “Pan-German League”

208 Marvaud, “La plus grande Espagne,” Questions diplomatiques et coloniales, Dec. 1904. Mella, El ideal de España,

1915, also counts to “dogmas nacionales” a reunification with “America’s united Spanish states”; where another

national dogma concerns the federation with Portugal, Brazil is also imagined within the bloc. See Das Grössere

Deutschland 18/12, 1915. C.f. The Great Powers, I, 46, 51, IV, 89. (author) More precisely, Mella sought “Estados

Unidos Españoles de América del Sur, para contrapesar los Estados Unidos sajones del Norte” (“Spanish United States

of South America to counter-balance the Saxon United States of the North”). See:

https://es.wikisource.org/wiki/El_ideal_de_Espa%C3%B1a._Los_tres_dogmas_nacionales

209 In this way the Austro-Hungarian peoples’ draw to Russia is shown to widely and in much as a mere side effect of their

hatred of the Germans and Magyars, see the Political Problems of the World War, p. 119. See therein also the whole of

chapter IV, “Racial Problems.” (author)

https://es.wikisource.org/wiki/El_ideal_de_Espa%C3%B1a._Los_tres_dogmas_nacionales

(Alldeutcher Verband) since 1891 (1894), a mass of more or less fantastical projects of a

“pangermanisches Deutschland” (Reimer 1905) or a “Grossdeutschland” (anonymous, 1895) have seen

the light of day in its trails210, and one or another voice has also been raised for that outside Germany

(such as Björnstjerne Björnson211). But while Sweden in the great press of the World War tends to

sympathize with the main German people, Norway’s and Denmark’s sympathies lean therefrom away,

and no Germanic power has openly placed itself on its side in the struggle—its extension in

Mitteleuropa goes, as has already been noted, not in the sign of the race.

In Switzerland, one has a special opportunity to observe the workings of the race thought, as

Romans and Germanics meet there within the same frame. The temptations of the World War have put

to test the cohesion across the racial gap therein, and it cannot be said that it has fully passed the test;

the different attractive forces have made themselves perceptible—in particular within the French Swiss

—to such a degree that serious patriotic concerns for the future have come to order.212 Also the

growing

tension between the Romance Walloons and the Germanic Flemish within the frame of the Belgian

state pointed toward the same direction before the war.

Before such events, one cannot deny the racial thought’s every practical significance within

contemporary history. One cannot even deny the possibility that it will have a word in the expansion of

the realm types themselves, and thus come to play a real political role. One must merely establish that

this time has not yet come. Our time stands under the sign of the nation-state. What in the area of ethnic

kinships stands above that, that is still at the stage of the pure dream or, at its height, the formless stage

of the nebula.

III.7. Special Problems

When we now finally cast a glance at the special ethnopolitics, a few conclusions shall offer themselves

as immediate corollaries to principles already fixed. The state shall in many ways be shown to be

defined by its people, as an integral component of its nature, and out of this connection emerge by

greater or smaller necessity certain tasks for its work.

III.7.1. Of the Degree and Type of Nationality

Such tasks follow first from the dynamic degree of the national feeling. It is clear from our entire

demonstration that the ideal here lies not in the extreme, but in the temperate zone; subsequently it

210 See hereon Hasse, Deutsche Grenzpolitik, 1906, ch. VII, and The Great Powers II, 157-58 (the question of a “Central

European” program in its earlier period).—Deckert, Panlatinismus, Panslavismus, und Panteutonismus in Ihrer

Bedeutung für die polit. Weltlage, 1914, sees in “pan-Teutonism” a superconcept within which both pan-Germanism and

“pan-Anglism” fit, pp. 25-. If we interpret the latter as a race thought in itself, for which there ought to be reasons, then

it is likely to be thought of as the most vitally forceful of them all, in its inner and its outer line, “imperial connection”

and “reunited states,” see (also for the full investigation) “The Political Race Problem” (“Det politiska rasproblemet”)

in Nya Dagl. Allehanda 24, 26, 27, and 28th Sept. 1916. According to Deckert, pan-Latinism represents 115 millions,

pan-Germanism roughly as many, pan-Slavism 135, and this pan-Anglism 150 (Anglophone) millions. Other

calculations in Friedenswarte, 1916, p. 291, where it is argued for “systematic racial politics.” Within the war, besides,

both the Germanic (v. Bieberstein’s call out of the trench “an die Völker germanischen Blutes” in Friedenswarte, 1914,

pp. 362-) and the Latin union thought (Messagern, Oct. 1916) has come in renewed expressions. (author)

211 Bjørnstjerne Martinius Bjørnson (1832-1910), first Norwegian Nobel laureate in Literature.

212 See here H. Meier, Die detschfiendliche Bewegung in der französischen Schweiz, 1915, and August Schmidt, Ueber die

angebliche Germanisiering der Schweiz, 1915, also Arnold von Salis, Die Neutralität der Schweiz, 1915. (author)

becomes a matter of great importance for the state to restore the balance whenever it is for any reason

disturbed. We see in our time an excess, a “too much,” to the fever temperature of “nationalism,” for

example in Serbia already before the war; in such cases it is the state’s duty to silence and hold back, so

that the feeling does not breach all constraints of reason. But there may also be too little, an

undernourishment of the national life, which G. Sundbärg has attempted to demonstrate on account of

the contemporary Swedes.213 This is an even greater threat. If the temperature sinks below a certain

threshold, as in the old Poland (see V.3.1), then there is simply no hope. The connection is clear from

the previous investigation; if the living sense of co-belonging within a nation is what motivates its

existence as state before everything else, then the condition for its existence falls away with the

extinction of that sense. When a nation thus loses its sense of nationality—when it is punctuated by

individual selfishnesses, as in the condition before the establishment of the original state—then there is

no longer a life, but an empty shell which hangs together without a core. The national indifference may

therefore develop into a “pernicious anemia” of the state. We see here if ever an inviting necessity to

seek ways of increasing the national temperature to the normal degree within such a state.

That the type of nationality214 suggests a multitude of political motives is clear without doubt so

long as one recognizes for the state any task in the cultivation of the people. May only one such motive

be brought forth in particular: if the nationality is not yet complete, it is the task of the state to watch

over this process, so that it as far as possible is kept clear from harmful elements. This is the case of

U.S.A.; the nation’s inability to absorb the negro element and unwillingness to do so, likewise to

assimilate too much less valuable blood from Eastern Europe has there as is known given cause for

very significant and current questions (immigration law, among others). Without doubt this concern for

the quality of the nation is one of the state’s categorical duties.

III.7.2. Of the Physical Replacement Cycle

The aforementioned America’s problem is connected to its abnormal immigration, and leads our

thoughts from the national questions to the people’s own purely physical replacement cycle. Here

various possible disturbances may be imagined, which to the highest degree call for the state’s

attention; primarily by a too great emigration, as in Sweden, Ireland, parts of Italy, or a too weak

nativity as in France and certain Anglo-Saxon countries and also, though to a lesser degree, in other

places of Europe. It is also well-known that these circ*mstances stand in the foreground within the

respective states’ politics and particularly of those in France. The seriousness of this danger shall be

emphasized in a later chapter; here we observe the way and the means: the “two-child system,”

sterilization of the marriage, the voluntary restriction of the number of children. This system denotes a

revolt against the elementary duty of every generation to maintain the existence tribe. Thus on the other

hand there is a question of the state’s self-preservation here. When it takes up the struggle for the

system in question, it is struggling for its own life.

Which means of defense does it possess? Against the second threat to the population number,

excessive losses by emigration, cures can be suggested by economic politics, as the threat is footed

213 See section “Bristen på nationell instinkt” (lack of national instinct) in Folklynnet och utvandringen (National

Character and the Emigration), pp. 25-57. (author)

214 nationalitetens art

primarily in economic causes which ought to be possible to mitigate. But the decrease in growth is

more difficult to treat, because its root is in the area of psychology. Thus one goes no further than to

palliatives which already in the time of emperor Augustus were shown to be futile: taxation of

bachelors and tax deductions for family supporters, premiation of child-rich families and the like.215

The system is a mirror of an over-reflected culture, in deep connection with the entire worldview. It is

no coincidence that it has put its roots deepest into that culture which was the predecessor people of

Europe and that state which likely could be considered the oldest of the state-system. Whether the

World War will be able effect a change in the obscure depths of the soul where these roots are seated is

perhaps the most important question which slumbers behind the curtains of the nearest future (c.f.

V.3.2.).

III.7.3. Of the Mathematical Relationship Between Realm and People

It is obvious that the purely statistical population count has a decisive influence on the direction of a

state’s entire politics, inwards and outwards. The situation of France,

with a stagnating population that

receives plenty enough space within the realm may be seen as the ideal, and has indeed been

interpreted as such in a certain socialist direction; there one makes thus direct propaganda against

fertility and in principle does not want to know of any “natural surplus” or population growth. This

direction neglects two perspectives. The first is that a people never stands alone in the world, but is in

constant competition against others; so long as all peoples do not begin to regulate their growth at the

same pace, it follows that the people which voluntarily ceases in growth shall condemn itself to

increasingly greater irrelevance with respect to the others. The second is this, that such a stagnating

condition in itself is harmful to the people; the peoples need as water a sound turnaround to stay

healthy—a standing river is a dead river. It is as Witz said in 1862: “Rising population count is not an

unconditional advantage, nor a sign of power, but a sinking population count signifies illness

always.”216 The French type, driven to its edge and celebrated as a program is a renunciation of

evolution itself, a farewell from history.

It must therefore, seen purely objectively, be regarded as an unorganic desire of such a state to

conduct an expansionary policy of such a great degree as the French Third Republic has done. That is

instead the cause of a rapidly growing people. Since all peoples under normal conditions first fill and

then overfill their spaces, the time ultimately arrives when there in the realm is more people than can

conveniently be held therein. The great state must then direct its politics toward the primitive task of

finding “bread in the desert” for their overflowing crowds of people. Herein lies really a part of the

contemporary imperialistic desires, since modern technics have made possible a growth of people in

the homelands to a greater degree than the country itself was able to develop. When a perhaps awake

and insightful observer of the great politics such as Carlgren in his “World-Political Explorations” of

1907 does not find words strong enough to condemn the “robber politics” of the great powers, some

attention ought to have been dedicated to this simple fact that they do not possess a free choice; they

stand strictly beneath the law of necessity, which invites them to care for the support of their own

215 See The Great Powers II, 71-72, c.f. the rich literature on the subject, in particular Bertillon, La dépopulation de la

France, 1911, and Julius Wolf, Der Geburtenrückgang, 1912. (author)

216 Waitz, Grundzüge der Politik, p. 22. (author)

outside of their borders. This was the cause of England; this is still the cause of Germany, Japan, Italy.

But this motive is significantly lacking on the count of France. There are no national needs behind its

enormous colonial empire: no surplus population, little overflowing capital (c.f. IV.1.). We partially

make the same remark on that American policy which laid hand on the Philippines and that Russian

policy which grasps for Europe. Here is a question of peoples that have not yet filled out their own

spaces, and for them a concentration in peaceful inner development is the natural policy. When they

carelessly go out into expansion, the moral of history corresponds to the private and labels their desires

as an overstep, which sooner or later ought to be followed by punishments.217

In this way, the general political direction of a state—its greater or lesser restraint in foreign

policy—is already pre-drawn by the mathematical relationship between its realm and its people (with

respect to household). We fix here the extremes of overpopulation and underpopulation according to

whether the realm is lesser or greater than the people based on the normal count within the state-

system, and find an expansionary policy just as natural in the former as that of concentration in the

latter case. It appears that the rules herewith apply also to the smaller states, for the little and utterly

strongly populated Belgium sought colonies (Congo) very organically and naturally. For Sweden, such

a policy would have been purely despicable before it has been able to organize and fill with people its

own realm, which is larger than three great powers’ motherlands (England, Japan, Italy). Here, the

political imperative inwards is all the clearer, as it concerns a space all the way up to and beyond the

threshold of the polar world, a space that thus poses a great resistance against cultural organization.

That, in addition, our situation—where the realm is greater than the people—is safer and holds a more

promising future of the two, does not need to be further demonstrated here.

III.8. Conclusion, Ethnopolitics

Thus the state’s free will is in many ways anchored to necessity also in its ethnic aspect. May it be

established once again that such observations do not describe the entire truth. Much like the natural

essence of the folk-soul is not limited to spiritual and customary influences, the actions of the state is

not contained within these laws which our grammatical investigation finds slumbering in objective

circ*mstances. A political teaching which obscures the irrational factors (“imponderabilia”) of people’s

lives denies itself as empirical. This reservation appears to be particularly in its place here as we now

transition to a brief overview of the aspects of state in which the cultural element begins to dominate.

217 It was this point of view that Ito made relevant against China in the Korean question of 1885, when he presented

China’s claims as those of a purely “historical,” while the Japanese were of an “economic” nature. Japan skildradt af

japaner (Japan depicted by the Japanese), 1904, p. 233. C.f. The Great Powers, 1905, pp. 107-8, and essay on “Private

morals and State Morals” (“Privatmoral och statmoral”) in Political Essays II. (author)

Fourth Chapter

The State As Household, Society, and Regiment

Economic Politics—Sociopolitics—Regimental Politics

IV.1. Concepts of the Household and Various Types

The realm is the people’s home and yard, within which foremostly it must gather for itself the outward

life’s basic necessities. For this purpose the realm must be organized. It may also happen that it has

become too small to cover the needs of the people; then the state must by other means, outside of itself,

care for the people’s maintenance. In this property of it, in its care for the people’s material life-needs

and economic life grounded in the realm, the state stands as an economic organism, or a household.

The study of the state as household we call economic politics.

Economic politics concerns itself with the national economy, even to the extent that it certainly

does not limit itself to the “state-financial” legislation concerning the state’s direct properties within the

realm (forests, crown lands, waterfalls, among others). But, as a political discipline, it is not interested

in the economic laws for their own sake, but only in their reflection on the health condition of the states

concerned218. It studies the states each on their own in all the parts which constitute its economic

dependencies, knowing well that this property in the the world of states, no less than that of private

people, is deeply significant for the entirety of its existence.

We meet occasionally here too a suggestion of this significance already in the names of the

states; such is the case of Argentina, the land of silver, and Brazil, the country with brazilwood. It is

apparent that the role of the household in the nature of the state has increased with the contemporary

increase in population and the overall materialization of life. On the other hand, household politics

have also greatly promoted this growth by the promotion of the economic life and primarily by the

population-tightening industry. Here, the politics of population and household

connect most intimately.

It is, though, easy to distinguish their boundaries in principle in the expansion, according to whether it

is the popular mass itself which overflows, or the production and the by that manner accumulated

capital.

In reality it is one of the economic politics’ main interests to follow the wanderings of

production and capital between the states. The state which has something to sell must do so by export,

whether it is a question of raw material, or fabricated goods, or pure capital. Here emerges the wide-

grasping distinction between the debtor- and the creditor-state219. U.S.A.’s relationship to Britain in the

area of raw goods, France’s to Russia in that of capital give world-historical examples. One sees by

them already how household needs tie political bonds.

The consequences are vast, vast to the extent that they ultimately could decide the entirety of a

nation’s politics. The country which has the surplus must place it in order to by the revenue satisfy its

overnumerous mouths. This is the case of England, with three times the population that its home-island

218 To compare, for example, Bernhard Harms, “Krieg und Weltwirtschaft” in Weltw. Archiv, April 1916, pp. 228-29, (the

distinction between Volkswirtschaft (“folk-economics”) and Staat (state)). (author)

219 borgenär- och gäldenärstat

could reasonably feed by its own resources. We do not need to go deeper into this well-known

situation, but turn our attention to certain political consequence which follow thereof. England must

therefore be involved with free trade, in part on its own side, so that its raw materials don’t grow

expensive at the ports of the realm, in part on that of others, so that England’s fabricated goods find

their way to other markets; the latter point of view found in the 1890s its buzzword in the “open door,”

with particular view on exotic households. England must also have a free way to these exotic

households, that is to say, supremacy on the sea, and for that sake suppress every competitor. That it

likewise itself has the greatest reason to secure for itself foreign reserves by colonization lies clear as a

day. The entire political problem of England is as such a household problem.

Similar is the case of other Western states, though to a lesser degree, just as they have not yet

reached as far by the way of industrialization. France, with its surplus of capital, and the U.S.A., with

its overflowing production, receive from these vantage points some right to the expansive politics

which in no way are justified on the grounds of population politics (see III.7.3.). The distinction of

over- and underpopulation do not always in practice correspond to over- and underproduction with

respect to capitalization; but each state has at every distinct time a decisive impression upon its nature

by its stance within the one or the other category.

The English type carries with it an impressive emphasis on trade, which regulates the outgoing

and incoming life-needs much like a blood circulation with arteries and veins; so, namely, that

fabricated goods dominate the export and raw materials the import. But this exchange of goods creates

similarly a strong under-balance220: far more is bought there than is sold there. The possibility hereto is

prepared by the already earned capital placed abroad, in addition to the sea traffic deployed and also the

incomes of a World War, such that the negative trade balance goes into a positive payment balance221.

This type too is found in all countries of high, industrial cultural standing. In the same way that the

“invisible export” of the purely capitalistic sources of income develops on top of the direct output of

goods, the household presents as an investor-state222. Herein lies also not only the outer character of a

creditor, but thereto the inner of a man who has begun withdrawing from the productive work. England

and France have advanced the most in this direction, although certainly not until the endpoint. Here the

contrast steps in against states such as Germany and the U.S.A., who still stand under the strong

stimulus of labor and therefore place the household gains into new corporations more than into loans.

On the opposite end against the English household stands, represented primarily by Russia, a

household type with a center of mass in the primary productive needs. That is to say that it is purely

agrarian in the question of production. Much like the industry, trade stands in a rear position, and this

trade balance is positive, with a high export, primarily that of raw materials, while industrial products

are imported. That does not exclude the possibility that the payment balance in its entirety may be

negative, by the state’s need for credit for its financial expenses, whereon the household regularly

slides into the debtor category.

220 underbalans

221 betalningsbalans

222 rentierstat

If the investor-state fittingly may be called an over-cultural type, the Russian system denotes a

colonial type223, just as Russia before the war held itself in relation to France and Germany as colonies

do to the motherland from a household point of view. The schema is violated by a few variants, such as

Sweden’s trade, formally a cultural type of preponderant import, displays a real colonial type:

overweighingly raw materials and half-fabrications (wood, iron ore). Its collected characteristics

belong only to primitive realm households and constitute distinguishing characteristics for these

households.

IV.1.1. Concept and Practice of Autarky

When we now in earlier periods of higher cultural states’ histories find similar primitive circ*mstances

in economic respect, the contrast between the extremes appears as different stages of one and the same

development. Experience has also very clearly shown us industrialization as a general process,

advancing at varying pace over all countries of the European culture, and from those also slowly

reproducing to the East. But experience and reflection give also to hand that this development

ultimately leads to dependence on the country abroad, which at the basis is barely more satisfying than

the colony’s immature and retarded condition. At the height of power and glory and joy, England has its

hands bound like hardly any other great power. It is for example not able at all to wage war against

U.S.A.: this would be a literal suicide, as this would mean—as the case is now—the same as by its own

hand cut its industry off from its foremost market of raw materials and by its own hand deprive its

people of their primary food supplies! Here if ever one can speak of vital questions och vital

necessities, which must in many ways hamper independent politics.

And therefore we arrive here at the same result as on all of the previous main points within this

investigation. The ideal is no longer the furthest end of the wing, but in a balanced position between the

wings. The solution to the general household problem is called autarky224, the median between the high

cultural and colonial type: economic self-sufficiency, so that the people’s essential needs may be

covered by the realm’s own incomes. A relatively separated, closed within itself region of production

and of consumption, which if necessary exists for itself behind closed doors. No all-consuming industry

and trade with thus following dependence on the abroad, but also not an all too dominant agriculture at

the expense of higher cultural demands; but a harmonic rotation and domestic supplementation within

the domestic economic life, so that a highly developed people’s various vital needs may be covered

within own borders.

Here we are struck by the complete agreement with the solution to the realms’s and the people’s

puzzles. Autarky is no more than the state’s economic individuality, much like the natural

territory is

the geographical and nationality the ethnic individuality. The decision on the economic politics

corresponds here to that of the geopolitical immediately, as we have already seen (see II.4.3.-II.4.4.);

but ethnopolitics too bears a parallel witness with its demand for a hom*ogeneous population closed

within itself. The autarkic household is the nationally and geographically differentiated one. So is the

state’s personality reflected in its various aspects, according to the law of organic life.

223 öfverkulturtyp, kolonityp

224 autarki

The first which now catches the eyes at the application of this general law to this area here in

question is the reaction against the industrial type of the 19th century. It was in its essence

cosmopolitan; in the name of free trade, it left the national households out to the competition in a

common world market, where the strong as always has opportunity to devour the weaker. The first

reaction came already through the protectionist225 system of the latter part of the century. Here, the state

steps forth to the defense of the household, countering foreign conquerors with toll-walls, within which

a national economic life may flourish as a forest plantation shielded from the storms of the sea226. It is

also noticeable that it is here able to act with greater liberty than with respect to previous, more purely

natural aspects of its essence; though, it is likewise clear that it it ultimately cannot move outside a

boundary determined by the qualities of the realm and the people.

But the autarchic principle is not satisfied with closing the national households behind toll

gates. It expands itself to a clear system, the closed “spheres of interest” (Dix) in place of that of the

open door. Nothing shows better the vindicating superiority of the system than that England itself here

steps out as its bearer: its latest deals (beginning with the French of 1904) point unmistakably in this

direction—they have reserved markets for themselves instead of competition on the free market. The

entire great Chamberlainian227 program, “the commercial union” with the self-governing colonies—

which after great difficulties at the port exit now appear to have gotten a good traction by the

experiences of the World War—is none other than the closure of an economic sphere of interest on the

account of the British nation. That free trade must be sacrificed for this goal shows only more clearly

the power of the idea.

Germany’s problem is in reality the same as England’s, to acquire for itself a secure market for

the purchase of raw materials and for the sale of fabricated goods, and the solution is thus even here

sought in a special sphere of interest. Only the paths are different: England already owns the sphere of

interest in its great Empire, and its task is therefore limited to closing it, while Germany must, on the

other hand, acquire the sphere itself. If England’s way to the goal is that of concentration, Germany’s

consequently becomes that of expansion. Here we meet therefore the programs of Berlin—Baghdad

and Mitteleuropa on the basis of free interconnection between the state-links: that is a closed sphere of

interest, where the primary productive life of the Levant is thought of as a supplement to Germany’s

industry. The entire problem of Mitteleuropa in its various phases appears now primarily as a

household problem. The World War, which for the nearest future has isolated the central powers from

the outside world market, has actualized the program, much like it once and for all has imprinted the

law of autarky: they would already have been brought to their knees long ago, had they not in the time

of need thought to transform themselves into the “geschlossene Handelsstaat”228, whereof Fichte

already foretold in the 19th century, and which is only a different name for the closed autarchic sphere

of interest.

225 protektionistiska

226 A special form of the economic hazard is the great households’ “Jumping” system; backed by their great domestic

markets, perhaps with strengthened power by concentration in cartels and trusts, they are able to expend surplus stores

at minuscule prices on the small markets if these are not protected by tolls. (author) Kjellén uses here the English word

for “Jumping.”

227 Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914)

228 “Closed trade-state”

We have hereto seen the problem only from one aspect, that of the industrialized state. From

that of the agrarian state the need is reversed: to create a self-sufficient industry, so that circulation of

goods beyond the doors is drawn within them. This is the secret of the “Witte229 system” on the count of

Russia at the turn of the century, much like especially the opposition against the current German trade

treaties, which were seen as standing in the way of Russia’s economic liberation. The aim here is thus

the same as in the previous case: equality between primary and secondary household necessities 230. The

means are also similar: the toll system, twice as necessary when it comes to constructing an industry

from the beginning. But if Germany’s way, in its narrow conditions, must be that of expansion, so must

Russia’s be that of concentration—in an interesting similarity to that of England, according to the law

of the similarity of extremes; the autarchic desire stimulates only on one point in Russia too the desire

for expansion, namely toward the Dardanelles’ natural exit point for their production.

The agrarian household’s longing to overcome its limitations is in reality a political factor no

smaller than the industrial household’s need to milden its risk. Occasionally, the principles can cut

against one another in the same area. From such a conflict comes the first hinder to the realization of

Mitteleuropa, namely the Hungarian policy which in the Ausgleich of 1907 led to the dissolution of the

toll union with Austria for a period of 10 years. The same conflict may sooner or later be fatal also to

the British Empire, which fundamentally rests on the colonies’ recognized economic inferiority.

We find therefore the autarchic principle by different ways at work in the surrounding world of

states, much like we found it theoretically correct.231 But if a warning against exclusivity was necessary

already in the previous chapter, it is even more at place here. The autarchic principle too must not

become a fetish whose worship closes the eyes to the significance and need of economic interaction

between the peoples. East Asia has here in history conducted warning examples by their strictly closed

and behind the locked doors stagnating states (China, Korea, Japan) right up to the threshold of our

time. Such a system stops development and thus receives its doom. The economic self-sufficiency must

not be bought at the cost of the folk-soul’s growth itself, which is conditioned by a normal interaction

with other states and peoples.

An exchange of goods will thus of course take place between the peoples in the state-systems of

the future too, and the difference in level of development will of course always preserve a part of the

“international division of labor” of the contemporary systems (the flattening of the primarily industrial

and the primarily agrarian states). By the same path that households gain their autarchic independence,

the differences between the strong variants in over-cultural- and colonial type evened, in favor of a

system that trades raw material for raw material and industrial good for other industrial good. Pohle

established this law for a natural exchange of products already in 1902, and Harms demonstrated it

229 Sergei Witte, Russian Minister of Finance 1892-1903.

230 See Political Problems of the World War, p. 143. When a critic, Peter Rassow in Preuss. Jahrbücher of Aug. 1916

regards the concept of autarky in this application to Russia “strongly expanded, essentially changed”—in this place it is

spoken

of “eine Beugung des Begriffs, die ihm fast wertlos macht” (“a bending of the concept which nearly makes it

worthless,” p. 301)—he does not appear to have had his eyes opened to the true inner meaning of the word. That

autarky can work in opposite forms is no more strange than that the nationality principle can work for sundering

(Turkey) as much as unity (Germany); c.f. above, III.5.2. (author)

231 The weaknesses, as remarked above in ch. II are noted for Norway and Chile in the realm shape itself are deepened here

by their all too one-sided natural origins. On Norway’s part, see “The New Scandinavia” in Political Essays III, pp.

150-51. (author)

most recently in 1916 as a tendency already present in “Volkswirthschaft.”232 That the primacy of the

domestic trade over foreign trade will be strengthened to a high degree is a natural consequence of the

autarchic development.

IV.1.2. Self-Preservation of the State in Economic Area

From this principle, light falls also on the important chapter within economic politics which treats the

households’ international orientation or the trade’s “territorial differentiation”233 (Harms). In its dry

number one may verify all degrees of sovereignty and dependence. It is known that Portugal’s vassal

relationship with England began through a trade treaty in 1703: this is still reflected in England taking

40% of their exports. That is also in itself a weak dependence in comparison to Mexico’s on U.S.A.:

55% of imports, 76% of exports. The threat to England’s occupation of Canada is similarly expressed

in the colony’s trade balance with U.S.A.: 60% of imports. Germany’s economic advantage over Russia

has emerged from similar counts: a full half of its import account, nearly a third part on the export

account. On the other side we see a solid ground beneath the tighter Mitteleuropa in the trade lists

which already before the war granted Germany a share of 40% of Austria-Hungary’s collected

circulation; at the same time as the insignificant cross-realm trade between Sweden and Norway eased

the break-up of the union. Here the state has powerful keys to bind and loose234 in its trade legislation;

so was the dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian “mellanrikslagen”235 in 1897 a factual forbidding of

the union, while the English colonies’ implementation of preferential tolls has tied the bond to the

motherland tighter. In this latter system (“differential tariff”), the modern state has gained a powerful

tool for purely political ends; it has already been applied to the traffic between independent states, such

as U.S.A. with Brazil (for the one’s grain and the other’s coffee), and ought in future bloc-formation

play an increasing role.236

It is obvious that the concern for the own independence offers a small state caution before it by

its trade circulation binds itself too closely to a great one; thereof the opposition in Sweden against the

German trade treaties of 1906 and 1911. A more even distribution within the circle of customers is here

advantageous. Our principle concerning production leads to the same result. The concept of autarky

forbids the one-sided tendency toward a single direction, which is denoted as monoculture237; the

example of Greece, with its dominant Corinth growing and thereof following crises, up to the state’s

half-bankruptcy, is here a warning.238

Instead it must be the statesman’s concern to develop the potentials of the state in all the

changing directions which its nature together with sound economic principles overhead provide. Every

232 Pohle, Deutschland am Scheidewege, 1902, p. 240, Harms, op. cit., p. 245. (author)

233 “territoriella differentiering”

234 Reference to Matt 16:19.

235 “inter-realm law”

236 At the entente powers’ economic conference in Paris of June 1916, the thought may have been entertained of a

differential system after the war according to the approximate schema: 30% toll for the enemy camp, 20% for the

neutral, 10% for the allies. (author)

237 monokultur

238 Schilder, “Die Monokultur in der Weltwirtschaft” in Zeitschr. für Socialwissenschaft, Oct. 1907, and

Entwicklungstendensen der Weltwirtschaft, II, 1915, ch. 3. C.f. latest on Greece, Rich. Marek in Geogr. Zeitschrift,

1916, p. 514. (author)

such victory signifies not merely a reduced risk for economic recessions, it is also a gain for the

national household, which herewith saves on one expense-posting of its account with the abroad. When

Sweden thus half a century ago began filling its need for sugar from its own beet fields, the import was

freed from the great post of sugar cane; and when we—which we hope happens soon—are fully in

condition to by own waterfalls and peat bogs replace the power need which hereto has been filled by

English black coal, this denotes not only a national economic saving of (typically) 100 million per year,

but also a political emancipation from the pressure of England. The World War has placed this point of

view to the highest relief (Italy, Greece); and the German inventions, which down there have

naturalized nitric acid and rubber in the realm household, demonstrate clearly how the details of

economic politics may have immediate significance for the life of the state itself, as direct supports for

its defense.

An insightful economic policy is therefore an element of the state’s struggle for self-

preservation, and has never been the stronger than in our time with its preference for the purely

material interests. From this imperative follows at every moment a diverse magnitude of special

problems, which the statesman has before him to solve; different for every country, according to its

special structure, but themselves gatherable to a common solution within the great postulate of autarky.

It was—to begin with only one example—this greater context which made the question of the Norrland

ore fields into a foreground question of Swedish politics in the first years of the new century (until the

resolution of 1907); behind the question of the state’s and the owning corporation’s income shares hid

the greater question concerning how Sweden were to preserve its chances to by domestic refinement of

the ore overcome its harmful character of a colonial trade type (see IV.1. introd.) and so add an ell to its

independent economic length.239 To the same extent that autarky is felt and recognized as a law for the

self-preservation of the state, to that extent clarity is spread over the right path in similar cases, and the

wisdom of statesmen much like their folly shows itself here too closed within boundaries dictated by

life’s own demands.

It should finally not be left out of sight that an autarchic development means the greatest

guarantee for the formation of real economic solidarity within a state’s productive life, in parity with

loyalty and nationality. Great and power-draining conflicts may emerge where this solidarity is no

longer preserved beneath the surface of the competition between producers and consumers. The World

War with its deflationary problems leaves thereon a few telling examples. But we stand therewith at the

threshold to the sociopolitical chapter.

IV.2. Concepts of Society and Successive Types

The fourth element of the state we denote as the society240 in specific sense, and the study thereon may

suitably be called sociopolitics, in analogy to sociology, which studies the social laws without

particular regard for their relation to the existing states.

From Aristotle (koinonia against polis) and Cicero (societas—civitas) to our contemporary

sociologists, the entire school of natural law included, one has used a concept of a society in a superior

relationship to the that of the state: the state has been one species among several in the family of the

239 See for example the motion in A.K. nr. 228 of year 1907. (author)

240 samhället

society. Rousseau’s

we find Richard Schmidt portray it as a gain

that one has begun closer examining law enforcement and administration11 in a science which earlier

had too one-sidedly only occupied itself with legal justice12. The whole discussion subject of Staat und

Gesellschaft13, over which such masses of German inc has flowed, rests on the premise of a contrast,

where the state denotes the legal establishment par préférence, whose innermost character is reflected

8 statskunskap, interpreted here as political science, properly means state-knowledge, making state and not politics its

explicit object.

9 författningskunskap

10 statsrätten

11 lagskipning och förvaltning

12 författningsrätt

13 “State and society”

in the name and expression of the legal state14. Rudolf Gneists classical study of Der Rechtstaat (1879)

is the clearest exponent of such a view. As a practical application thereof we find not rarely “law and

state studies” combined in one and the same university faculty, as is already done in Stockholm

(compare our “accession register”) and Copenhagen, and particularly in the Austro-Hungarian

academic organization.15

Behind this fundamental view we recognize again one of the most powerful traditions that has

ever determined a science’s development, namely that of the natural law with its judicial “social

contract” theory; and the core point itself, identification of state with law, can be traced through

Machiavelli and Cicero16 all the way to Aristotle, our science’s father. It is therefore here a question of a

viewpoint with a more than a 2000-year-long background. But it is precisely within our days that it has

made itself particularly relevant, which finds a very direct explanation in a situation beyond the

scientific tradition, namely the state-life’s actual manifestation.

However much we may wish to imagine the science in an unmolested majesty above the flows

of time, we cannot close our eyes for its actual dependence on them. The forces which govern there lie

in all cases too widely and too deeply to, in a significant manner, let themselves be governed by the

science. Not in condition to fulfill the role of director-general, the political science17 resigns to the role

of registrar. As the contemporary state is, such is the political science tempted to be: a defense of the

transiently realized state-ideal, rather than a true mirror of the state-idea itself. But it is then all the

more necessary for it to not lag behind the object in its development.

It is an impressive theater to see the state-idea wander through the times, at times spreading

itself over the individual sphere of interest, at times withdrawing itself away from it, in a mighty

rhythm whose beat corresponds to that of the general world history. We see it therefore expand in the

powerful state-consciousness of the ancient Europe, only to thin itself out in the corporate being of the

middle ages; again culminate in the age of the absolute monarchy, and once again be reduced in that of

the liberal individualism, which put its mark on the 19th century. The secret behind our official

understanding of the political science is now this, that it always maintains the theoretical adaption to

the latest manifestation of the state-idea.

For the famous Manchester school—“the Minimisers,” with roots in Locke and Kant—really

did not wish to see more than a “deliverer of judicial security” and a guarantor for the rule of law. This

state’s task was exhausted at the declaration of the formal right; then it comes to the individual to be the

bearer of positive development. Such a state does, in reality, become hardly more than a juridical-

14 rättsstat, also Rechtstaat in German

15 With a fleeting glance on the university calendar Minerva, I have found this categorization in no less than ten university

colleges within the Habsburg monarchy, namely Vienna, Graz, Innsbruck, Klagenfurt, Czernovitz, Krakau, Budapest,

Agram and the two in Prague. The same is the case at the Universities of Freiburg, Münster, Würzburg, and Strassburg

in Germany. Munich has a staatswirthschaftlische faculty (state-economic), and Tübingen has just in 1882 renamed one

similarly called to staatswissenschafliche (state-scientific). See Georg V. Mayr, Geschichte und Gliederung der

Staatswissenschaften, 1906, pp. 58-59, 119, compare to his “Rektorats-Rede,” 6/12 1913 (“sozialwissenschaftliche”).

(author)

16 The classical place in Machiavelli’s Il principe reads that “all states are republics or principalities,” with accent in this

way placed on the form of their constitution. Similarly, Cicero’s status rei publicae, the terminological root of

Machiavelli’s and the contemporary “state,” refers primarily to the legal condition. (author)

17 This is the first instance of the author referring to den politiska vetenskapen, the political science literally, rather than

statskunskapen.

administrative fact, a “bitter and unpleasant man behind a hatch,” according to the definition of Anatole

France (in Bergeret in Paris18).

Can one deny that this definition to some degree meets even our Swedish state of the late 19 th

century? A strong and fateful witness in this direction is given by the economic history of Norrland in

this time, with its governmental respect for the property right even in its abuse; another tells of the

judicial faculty’s long real monopoly on recruitment for our public offices. The connection is clear as a

day: when the state’s overall activity is limited to ensuring that everything proceeds in good order

according to given law, then education for the state’s service is a legal study and little more. To serve

the state is to serve justice, and that ends there.

In this state-practice and its one-sided formal-judicial view of the state’s purposes, we see the

foremost, or at least the one closest at hand, explanation for the political science’s limitation, as it in the

organization of studies has been made into a legal study. Because our state has in reality had its field of

activities so overwhelmingly concentrated within the law, that is why our state science19 became a

judicial science. We see an epistemological fruit on the same tree which on another branch carried the

formation of latifundia in Norrland and on another the so often disliked formalism in our public offices.

Venturing, this state of affairs—which might not give in to the uncalled-for afterthought—will

take to opening its eyes to the practical consequences of such a limited perspective. Consciousness

thereon has also awakened in men of practical politics and taken expression in a general reaction

against the Manchester ideal in the area of the state-life; and so, among us the state has, through new

legislation in Norrland of 1906, seriously intruded on that one area which it previously was so adamant

to defend, and in 1908 a reform in public servants’ education on a wider basis than only the juridical (a

“state-scientific exam”) was officially brought to the agenda. It is but a moment in the same general

movement of the time, if one is now to fix attention directly on the need for a reformed state science,

no longer closed within the horizon of Manchester, no longer looking back to a time-turning of the past

while the Western state’s evolution of government itself is in motion to manifest new, richer content.

If one has gotten these connections in sight once, then one cannot avoid the conclusion: our

traditional state science must be beaten away, like a ring that has become too tight for the finger it

embraces. It must be done for the science’s own sake, so as to not let it become too gray of a theory in

front of the green tree whose shadow it sits in. It must even be done for the people’s sake, who to more

than a normal degree, especially in this time, are in need of this element of education. The Sweden of

universal suffrage cannot afford missing out on a contemporary political education.

volonté de tous in contrast to volonté générale241 constitutes an attempt thereover,

Schlözer’s Gemeinde242 similarly, Hegel and the first socialists have from the other direction

contributed to the distillation of the concept as an opposite to the state, but first by the middle of the

19th century a similar contrast was established in the concept of Gesellschaft243 as it appears in Lorenz

Stein’s and Robert von Mohl’s ground-laying investigations.244 The modern concept of the society is

therefore even younger than the concept of nationality: two generations against three. It stands like the

people in conceptual contrast against, but likewise in empirical congruence with the state: each state is

a society, and every society a state. It is thus the state itself seen from a certain point of view.

How does the state behave as societas? According to Mohl’s thought (further elaborated by

Gneist in 1879, see above, Introduction), we see in Gesellschaft the summary of all natural spheres of

interest, which according to the demands of culture and the law of labor distribution bind citizens into

smaller groups within one and same frame of the state: local and stranger, educated and uneducated,

worker and employer, different types of workers, and so on. The society is therefore a real multitude of

internally competing interests, while the national people are a natural unit of similar individuals. The

society is a working limb in the cultural world, while the nation is a physical species of the humanity.

The society is the last generation itself in its living world of shifting interests and ideas, when the

nation is a continuous connection between the generations. That this living generation too never can

free itself entirely of the elementary powers of nature and of the folk-soul is certainly not denied here.

IV.2.1. Relationship to Economic Politics

In contemporary understanding, the household too is an element of society, to the extent that it denotes

the summary and entirety of the economic interest groups. For this reason, I have hereto also included

economic politics inside the frame of the sociopolitics.245 Continuing reflection has led to a change, so

that I now limit the concept of society to the area of the purely social powers, or the culturally

characterized organic fragments of the popular mass, while the economic organization of the realm is

reserved for the new sub-discipline. But it is hereof already clear that that economic politics and

sociopolitics share particularly intimate connections. Economic interests separate competing groups

241 “will of all,” “general will”

242 “community”

243 “society”

244 See Stein, “Das Begriff der Gesellschaft,” 1850; von Mohl in Tübinger Zeitschrift für Staatswissenschaft 1851, H. 1,

also in Geschichte und Literatur der Staatswissenschaften I, 1855, pp. 88-101. (author)

245 So still in The Political Problems of the World War, see p. 129. Peter Kassow, op. cit., appears to believe that these

disciplines overall do not rank with geo- and ethnopolitics, as their problems are of a “of mendable nature”—“af

medelbar natur” and “too a good part lay as deeper layers of motives beneath the geopolitical and ethnopolitical

contradictions”—“till god del ligga som djupare motivskikt under de geopolitiska och etnopolitiska motsatserna” (p.

299, “delmotiver inom de geopolitiska” [“componential motives within the geopolitical ones”], p. 302). Herewith a new

critic, Pohle, agrees in principle in Zeitschr. für Sozialwissenschaft, 1916, p. 681. Certainly it is possible to so extend the

frame of geopolitics that even the entirety of economic politics fit therein, and similarly the ethnopolitics on the account

of sociopolitics. Aside from that the gap between sociopolitics and economic politics becomes thereby deepened, such a

contraction of the system would exactly increase the fusion of natural and cultural sciences which I especially have

worked to soften. I do not overlook that geo- and ethnopolitics—even within my delimitation—also contain cultural

moments: but the present demonstration ought in its entirety bear witness of the dominant natural character over their

objects, in comparison to the similarly dominant cultural character of the competing disciplines. It is this division which

carries the fundamental thought of my system. One who reads ch. I above shall understand that I assert the count of five

over that of three, and why I do so. (author)

within the states, and acquire therewith a social character. The struggles between producers and

consumers, between agrarians and industrialists, between protectionists and free-traders, between the

export interests and advocates of domestic refinement are such social reflexes of economic

contradictions. The great struggle between capital and labor belongs here to a certain degree. If we then

imagine the contrast between great and small possession—the latifundium institution’s meaning for

England and Italy, the trust institution’s for U.S.A., the corporate power’s in Norrland for Sweden, on

the other hand the even land distribution for France in a more fortunate direction—then this chapter

becomes full of subjects which may seem to just as well belong to the household politics.

On the other hand, sociopolitics do have their very characteristic and independent area, namely

that which concerns the so-called social classes themselves. Within household politics, the state lives

only on bread; in sociopolitics we learn to know other and higher needs, up to the spiritual culture’s

most refined consumption demands. Thereto both disciplines have each its own characteristic

perspective also on the same object; in one case production, in the other the living group. It is the same

difference which has separated national economics and sociology into separate sciences, since they

long ago were taken as one.

The contemporary socialist doctrine does by principle not want to know of any needs other than

the economic as the foundation of human interconnections. A glance at the different developmental

stages of society and successively replaced types shall thoroughly disperse this prejudice.

IV.2.2. Types of Societies

It is now immediately shown—much like in the question of the nation (see III.5.1., III.5.4.)—that if

society in our modern sense is a late conquest of science, then the item itself is old, older in fact than

the state itself. Furthest back in time we find the kin society, the original type, the society of the bonds

of blood as the nearest and the only bonds before the emergence of the distribution of labor; humans

are still found on wandering foot and all share the same interests, food for the day and security against

the attacks of enemies. In this social body, the kin constitutes the cell itself as a natural unit; as such it

is also responsible for its members. The type is found in all cultural peoples’ childhoods246 and similarly

in the contemporary nomadizing cultural peoples.

With growing development, the kins settle down on determined soil, which is taken for

plantation; over long processes, which we can only follow in darkness, the brother-bonds are loosened,

kins dissolved, and the community of the blood is replaced by that of the neighborhood. One feels more

naturally bound to one’s neighbor in the village who shares the everyday activities than to one’s

relative in another village. Thus the neighborhood becomes the cell of a new, second type, the village

society247, which relieves the kin of the care and responsibility for its own. The territorial perspective is

here dominant after the genealogical has been consumed.

The great law of labor division now begins working within the settled farming population.

Different classes differentiate themselves from a “mature” mass: for the defense and the real state-

purposes, for culture and education, for trade and other industries besides farming. Thus begins

a new

246 Newer research has found it even in Japan, where one has long denied it, see Kjellén, “Japan’s ‘ancien régime,’” in

Statsvet. Tidskrift 1906, p. 254. (author)

247 bysamhället

process of transformation where the social occupation gradually takes the privileges of the shared

residency. When these occupations with the aid of the state have crystallized privileged corporations,

then a third societal type is distinguished from them, that of the estate society248, where the community

with likes (“peers”) is felt to be more living and binding than with neighbors in the village, not to speak

of relatives within another estate in the kin.

This estate society developed over time into a house with different etages above each other,

while at the cellar level the unfree mass of the people was kept. New great interest groups formed

themselves likewise, for whom there was no place among the floors. Thus the type solidified in

privileged bodies and gradations among the citizens. Reaction was not lacking; it came in the form of

the French revolution, in the combined name of liberty, equality, and fraternity, where equality had the

most immediate social intentions. The result was the contemporary “civic society,”249 where the

individual stands before the state as liberated of all lesser bonds, carried by the naked fact that he

exists.

Sweden’s oldest legal source, the older Westrogothic law250 of the early 13th century, reflects

clearly the second type, the village society, while the first kin type glimpses in the background and the

third estate type looms above the foreground.251 In the present time we see the latter type in the

background; it is over the half-millennial course of history consumed as the others before it, hiding its

last remnants among us in the Council of Nobles (in a certain way also in the Church Council) 252. But if

we now turn our sight forward, would we see a successor? The official “civic society” which surrounds

ourselves cannot claim the heritage. It is namely distinct from all of the previous ones thereby that it

does not enclose one in solidaric circles; in accordance with the natural law’s and liberalism’s atomic

understanding, it bases the state directly on the individuals. But therewith it actually negates society’s

own principle as it was established by Mohl.253 Its nature is from a social perspective dissolving,

suppressive, equalizing. It throws gravel over the lot where the estate society stood, but it builds

nothing new or positive. At once it stands clear to us that we live in a transitory stage, such as must

always be present in-between the types. We stand in the trough of a wave after an evened social high

flood, and have for us to expect a new escalation whose culmination will give us a new social form

around a new principle.

And we do not need to strain our eyes to see this new element emerge over the graveled lot. All

around us it simmers and seethes of young life which wants to break forth. Organically and freely, as

plants in nature’s spring, social formations shoot up for whom the ideal of liberalism fits the least. It is

the union and the association. It points clearly toward a new societal type, directly emerged from that

248 ståndsamhället

249 medborgarsamhälle, “citizen society”

250 Västgötalagen

251 It was in my studies of this law when I first believed that I saw the law-bound succession of societal types, see “State

and Society in the Old Westrogothic Law” (“Stat och samhälle I det gamla Vestergötalagen”), II in Tidskr. For

Retsvidenskab, 1898, p. 230; c.f. later “A Collective Program in the Question of Suffrage” (“Ett samlingsprogram i

rösträttsfrågan”), 1902, pp. 9-15. (author)

252 adelsmötet, kyrkmötet

253 This is why this word, Gesellschaft, when it first was pronounced, acted as a petrifying Medusa head to the educateds’

“Freiheitsgewohnheiten” (“habits of liberty”), according to Mohl’s own expression in Geschichte und Literatur der

Statwiss., I, p. 71. (author)

principle of labor division which has never been more inviting than in our days, but on basis of equality

and the national gathering, as an acquisition from the liberal transitory period. It is the consciousness of

the modern classes, which here within the states corresponds to the nations’ awakening within the state-

system. The former have in the first partial awakening had the liberty to break the frame of the latter

(the workers’ international); here the World War has without doubt solved the problem of showing them

the way back home. We see it all the clearer how the connection between comrades rises to a leading

social principle ever since the bond between the similar, the the neighbors, the relatives has loosened.

The result which is thus hovering in the foreground of our age is therefore a quaternary societal type,

the association- or the union society, emerging from the blue collar workers’ unification with the

employers’ and the literate occupations’ of all types and sorts and striving for one goal, where the

society’s natural interest groups have all attained organization and appropriate place in the cultural

work.

IV.2.3. Natural Society and Sociality

For every given standpoint of the long evolution which we have sketched out here, the state has

possessed a determined characteristic of the societal form. When we now see all of the cultural

countries as if fingering for a sound and natural worker- and employment organization within their

nations, we witness so once again such a phenomenon as we have previously fixed within the

geographical, ethnic, and cultural spheres. The state seeks for its foundation a natural society, as

complement to the natural territory, nation, and the autarchic household.

In reality it is an entirely direct connection. If a harmonic complement of natural contrasts

which in mutual circulation seek to even themselves is the correct geographical and economic

foundation, so follows hereof as a corollary the harmonic social foundation in that the interest groups

by themselves are separated into the distinct natural types and household interests. But one single

dominant class interest is just as unnatural as a uniform country or a monoculture. The evolution of

technics over time forbids also in the cultural countries such petrifying one-sidedness for society as for

household and realm. The differentiation of classes is a corollary to the distribution of labor itself, a

necessary product of the cultural development, and cannot be extinguished other than in connection

with the entire culture. But through the idea of citizenship, the classes have been coordinated with each

other instead of the estate society’s subordination and at the same time embraced the entire people

instead of the estate society’s privileged body. So is the path paved for the complete social organization

in which the working class has been only a forerunner, and of which we at the completion of times—

when the period of transition with its birthing pains has passed—expect a harmonic balance between all

justified cultural interests, according to their own value for the commons.

The sense of this harmony is what I call sociality254. One sees immediately the analogy with

nationality, which means solidarity within the people, just as loyalty, which is solidarity beneath the

law. The organic society has its unity much like the nation’s in a diversity much like the realm’s and the

household’s. In its interaction with the state, it offers as dowry the fixed, concrete reality of living

interests, and receives as such of the state as wedding gift the reins upon egotism whereof the classes

254 socialitet

are in need of no less than the nation itself in times of necessity if they are to be fit for service to the

tranquil development.

It follows from the aforementioned that sociality offers a reliable barometer on which

one may

read the strength or the weakness of the state. Where the classes are unable to find a modus vivendi, but

lie in constant internal feud, there the state’s own ability to act is paralyzed; so much more when the

classes eagerly present demands against the state and hold it accountable for their needs’ supposed

neglect, so that loyalty vanishes with sociality. The classical example are the plebeians of Rome by the

Sacred Mount, in open renunciation of faith and obedience to the state. This is the dangerous situation

which returned in England at the industrialization’s entry, and which by Disraeli was in 1845

characterized by the famous word of the “Two Nations”: the upper- and lower class, which lived

together, yet still were in mindset and interests just as fractured as if a world sea was between them.

That time the English state succeeded in by wise policy overcoming the gap and restoring sociality,

much like Rome in its time. But forwards to our days the danger has returned to England, much like

other Western countries, by socialism’s emergence with an open anti-state program. In actuality, the

weak sociality belongs with the signature of our time; entirely natural in times of change, when the new

society has not yet attained its organic form. Where no nation state has been possible to realize, as in

Austria-Hungary and Russia, there the “nationalities” emerge as classes and fuel the fragmentation with

a new element; and the same may be the case where there are different religions beneath one state, as in

Germany, Russia, and the realms of the Levant.

IV.2.4. Purpose of the State in the Social Conflict

The threat of the contemporary societies’ fragmentation has its crown therein that the classes

increasingly consciously have designated the state itself as the victor’s prize in the struggle, in order to

by its power advance their own one-sided interests. Thus, socialism is not in principle hostile to the

state—as is known, it resonates in quite the opposite way with state power to an exaggeration—but the

condition for its faith in the state has hereto been that it itself, as the defender of the working class, has

the state power in its own hands. In U.S.A., where the demand for labor is greater than the supply and

the air is otherwise not good for the growth of socialist dissatisfaction, the capital itself and the labor

companies (“trusts”) step out as rivals to the state, by more or less secret path seeking to secure it for

themselves as an ally or otherwise neutralize as an opponent.

So must the modern state wage a struggle on two fronts in order to under the name of the

“commons,”255 which is harmed by the supremacy of these class interests, assert its unitary and superior

interest. This too is a task of self-preservation, but directed against internal rivalries rather than outer.

Here tasks are met saturated with political necessity, not to abort the class conflict—which is

impossible and, if possible, would be harmful—but to soften, even it out, reconcile it when tensions

have exceeded the normal, push it back when its waves threaten wash away the regiment itself.

The unmistakable moral condition for a happy solution to this great state-purpose is now this,

that the state does not in advance allow itself solidarity with any of the competing class interests in any

form other than what is necessary for its objective (national) aims. The paths are entirely naturally

twofold: preventive and curative. Bismark showed the way of the prophylactic method in the 1880s:

255 allmänheten

soziale Fürsorge256 by work insurances of all kinds (primarily the elder insurance), but further by

oversight257 over the industry, limitations on labor hazardous to health, and overall by the changing

work which is summarized under the name of social legislation—we shall meet important components

thereof also in the domain of pure legislation (see IV.3.4.). The therapeutic methods are more fragile

and insecure. Here too we meet various kinds of social legislation, going back to the Licinian in Rome.

A natural method is further for example the work of conciliators in the direct gains of labor

(“förlikningsmän”).

Naturally, all involvement of the state must occur with strong protection of the legal order.

Where it is openly threatened—such as in the organized anarchy of “syndicalism” in France, with the

strike as normal warfare to the guerilla warfare of “sabotage” and the “general strike’s” decisive punch

against the state—there the state has one duty alone, the same as in the case of foreign enemies at the

border: to show that authority does not carry its sword in vain. When sociality and loyalty have

dwindled in large parts of the population, there the state has an old recipe at its disposal: to draw

attention from the fragmented domestic interests to that side which concerns all and therefore must

unite, namely the foreign policy. These are the politics of “distraction,” and they may under certain

circ*mstances even lead all the way to war; thus it is not difficult to interpret Bismarck’s wars of the

1860s under burning parliamentary conflict, likewise Russia’s war against Japan at the threshold of

revolution in 1904, and it is not difficult to recognize such threads here and there in the motive-twining

of the World War itself.258 Though, it must always be asserted that the sword of authority drawn in such

calculation is double-edged, as Russia found out in 1905.

We finish the chapter with the observation that the state’s own activity has distinguished two

social classes—that is, a direct component of society, corresponding to the crown domains of the realm

and the fiscus of the household—namely the army and the corps of public officials, which thus stand at

its immediate disposal as tools in the service of social reconciliation and development.

IV.3. Concepts of the Regiment

The state’s fifth and innermost element is the regiment259: the state power in pregnant sense, the

dominion, authority, the judicial organization for gubernatorial purposes. One sees from the outset that

regimental politics260 is a different science than state justice, although they touch each other in the same

area. The latter’s object is the judicial subject of the state, the former’s is the judicially organized state

power. The latter therefore studies its object at rest and in constituent acts; regimental politics in turn

256 “social care”

257 övervakning—surveillance or guardianship

258 In addition to remarks hereon in The Political Problems of the World War, pp. 130-135, a testimony of Bishop Gore in

Oxford may added regarding how the World War on England’s part has prevented an immediately threatening class war

domestically, see The Struggle Behind the Fronts (Kampen bakom fronterna), published by Kristl. Studentförbundet,

195, pp. 125, 127, 130. (author)

259 regementet

260 I am not quite satisfied with the expression (regementspolitiken), but find no better; legal- and administrative politics

(författnings- och förvaltningspolitik) are but parts of the whole, and regimental politics too seems to have a more

limited embrace. Gubernatorial politics (Guvernementspolitik) appears adequate, though is formally heavy. If it did not

appear tautological, one may have, in connection to the more narrow notion of the state, employed the expression of

state politics (statspolitik). In German, Herrschaftspolitik offers itself naturally.

see in the state an active will, and investigates the manner whereby it is in reality constituted (law), as

well as the forms in which it factually works (administration), and the boundaries which the state itself

places for its sovereign occupations, though its primary interest lies in area of legislation.261 Thus the

juridical and the political sciences intersect within this field, each with its own perspective, its

dominant interest, and its methods.

It happens

occasionally that this aspect of the state-life too comes up in the nomenclature,

although not directly: so in United States of America, die Scweizerische Eidgenossenschaft, The British

Empire, former Orange Free State262. More pregnantly, the form of state itself may be used to denote a

state in everyday speech, such as the French Republic, the Habsburg Monarchy; and we find Germany

more often nowadays denoted in the enemy press by “Kaiser.”

The real principle of the state, even as dominion inwardly, is the political purposefulness263 and

not the justice264. In the practical state-life there is as a rule no difference here. The state realizes justice

because it has seen its purposefulness. Justice so understood becomes the spiritual crown of the state’s

entire personality. By the idea of justice it seeks to realize itself as a rational personhood. The judicially

soaked regiment may be understood as the latest expression of the spirit of the state.265

It is therefore not only for practical reasons that the state seeks to place under itself also areas of

the cultural life, such as the relationship between employer and employees. It is in agreement with its

nature to place the entire cultural life beneath law. It acts therewith as the grower who puts to use a

piece of wild land by the field: not merely because weeds therefrom easily transfer to his old growths,

but also because he feels responsible for the garden as an entrusted good.

The character of the state power herewith appears quite clear in comparison to the other

elements of the state. The nation has senses, the society (and household) interests; the regiment entails

duties. Against the nation’s sensual nature, the state places in the regiment its rational desire, against

the class struggle and unfreedom its durable institutions and its legally protected liberty. The regiment

is therefore the core of the state’s cultural aspect in which it seeks to overcome nature’s and desire’s

authority by self-conscious and free actions.

Here shall only in a fleeting review be demonstrated a few characteristics of the context which

binds the state by the lower aspects of its personhood and therewith prevent it from asserting its

rational, free will’s absolute presence.

IV.3.1. Its Roots in the Soil

A sound state legislation, thus, stretches its roots all the way down into the earth. The country colors

the temperament of the nation, and this is realized in the form of government: “Tropical India cannot be

261 “The occupation of the state is, by its true nature, law” (“Statsverksamhet är den till sin egentliga natur förvaltning”),

Reuterskjöld in Statsvet. Tidskrift 1911, p. 297. (author)

262 Oranjefristaten

263 ändamålsenligheten

264 rätten—right, justice

265 The state is the person, the I, the life, whereof the regiment is a manifestation—much like the society and other

phenomena here explored. It is in this sense that the state by our investigation is portrayed in conceptual contrast against

every element in itself, working therein and affected thereby.—With the gaze directed primarily against the organization

of power, Ruehoffer understands the state primarily as a body to the soul of the nation, see op. cit. p. 16. This viewpoint

coincides clearly with Riezler’s general schema, see I.2.1. (author)

governed as freely as cool Canada” (John Morley). The country indicates further the productive life,

and this marks in its turn the law: an industrialized people is not so satisfied with small measures of

freedom as a people of peasants is. The space itself occasionally plays a powerful role in the form of

government: enormous spaces have thus shown themselves to be difficult to rule constitutionally

(Brazil 1824-1889, Russia after 1905); they strive for a Caesarian (Rome, Russia before 1905, India) or

federalistic form (U.S.A., Canada, Brazil after 1889, Australia)—whereto also narrow Alpine parts are

predisposed (Switzerland). It is in itself obvious that the cohesion of a great dominion requires a strong

hand: imperialism presupposes an imperator.

But most of all it is its own historical experience and achieved cultural level which naturally

impacts the people’s constitutional demands, which in no wise are are the same as the neighbor’s.

Every people is a historical unicum, and this makes itself not the least bit relevant when it comes to

writing or accepting its legal form as a state. It shall now not be denied that the written law itself is able

to exercise a certain effect on the development; in this way, Norway’s Grundelov has without doubt

blown into the people’s republican tendencies. But it always falls short in serious conflicts with the real

life. This is noticeable in particular where different legal ideas have been linked together in the same

regiment, as in the Romance and German state ideal in Prussia’s constitution of 1850 or the monarchic

administration and democratic law of the French form of government of 1875; the opposites cannot

then lie peacefully still at each other’s side as mixed styles of a constructed wall, but rise to battle

against one another, and the battle shall continue until one of them succeeds in leaving its mark on the

entire form of government.266

Thus life asserts its primacy before even the most deeply venerated constitution. It is also

shown in the emergence of customary justice in which verdict precedes written law. Sweden’s

constitution of 1809, once grown on national soil with minimal possible foreign cultivation, stands in

this day as an aged tree in certain parts overgrown by a blooming primeval forest of “praxis”; it is the

people that was changed by the power of new times’ ideas, and this change has even with no alteration

of constitution been reflected in the living form of government.

IV.3.2. The Personhood Demand: Universal Suffrage

How life claims its right even by universal recipes of state-justice shows itself likewise in that point of

the law through which this has allowed itself to be implemented most universally, namely through the

representative system. Modern democratism has presented the universal suffrage in the name of the

individual, as a civic birthright, and as such it has made its victory parade through the West; where it

has not yet arrived, there it presses constantly against the door (Prussia, Hungary). In reality it is the

people which by this way makes itself matter in the political life. For this universal suffrage allows in

principle everything which finds itself at the bottom of the people come to the surface. Here is no

longer a question of selecting the specific rational elements from the popular mass; here it is asked of

the people as such, as a fact, with both advantages and errors. The apostles of the principle naturally

imagine that it will of its own by some obscure way select out the undesirable and let the good within

266 It is Fahlbeck who first fixed attention to this phenomenon in his genius lecture on “constitutional types and

constitutional conflicts” at the Nordic academic conference in Gothenburg of 1899, unfortunately only extant as a

summary in the report of the conference, published in 1900, p. 92-97. (author)

the people seize the high seat. Reality has already all too clearly refuted this blind and prejudiced

belief. What comes out of the voting booths during the general elections is the people’s own mass

“jenseits von Gut und Böse.” When now this mass similarly, in the name of democracy, is granted the

decision of the state’s leadership, the result is what it must be: politics which plays more and more on

the temperament of the people and society’s fancy of the day. As these vary between states, so too does

the outcome vary. The same method yields clerical politics in Belgium and radical politics in France,

war in Romania and neutrality in Sweden. The spirit is one, but the gifts are various, and similarity in

law does not prevent an endless variation within the

real political life.

In the unopposable march of the universal suffrage through the state-system we recognize thus

the modern state’s power of personhood; but, at the same time, we establish how far it leads from the

abstractly just and rational if it is made fact with no counterweight. From a purely practical standpoint,

the method has awakened great considerations just through its numerical method, which gives the

numerical plurality the right without respect for quality; when now the working classes posses the

plurality in an industrialized society, this electoral method threatens to grant them all of the power into

their own hands—and the one-sidedness, which has shown itself condemnable in all previous chapters

where it is a question of the state’s lower attributes, would enlarge itself to the greatest extent.

It is therefore not to wonder that a general reaction is now in motion around our continent267

against this electoral system with its disdain for all greatnesses but the bare unqualified majority.

Primarily, this reaction has taken aim against the electoral method itself and the by proportional

representation sought a technical guarantee against the danger of a single class’s dominance; this

solution, in its contemporary form, descends practically from Belgium of 1899, and has since

conquered the Nordic countries and stands on the agenda in France itself, the general elections’

motherland. In a different form, the reaction is concentrated on the division of electoral districts, and

seeks to correct it according to social contrasts (attempts in Prussia, 1906, and Austria, 1907, and the so

called “Mossebo Program”268 in Sweden). But behind all of these technical solutions, one and the same

great thought shines through: not to abolish the universal suffrage, but to organize it, so that it reflects

not only the unity of the nation, but also the diversity of society. The universal suffrage creates a

national representation alone; what we strive for is a social or societal representation.

IV.3.3. Natural Representation

Here the connection between regiment and society threads forth in a sudden explanatory light. No

political forms which are not direct expressions of the social realities may receive a guarantee of

durability. The rule validates itself through all times. In the time of the village society, representation

too stood on territorial basis. When evolution continued toward the estate society, the estate

representation emerged on the social basis of its time, in order to ultimately disappear with all attributes

of popular freedom into the autocratic system. The French revolution has now cleared the table; the

nation itself mobilized against the old society, and universal suffrage with public elections became its

dual battering rams, one directed against the throne and the other against its privileged supporters, and

“national representation” was the result of the two. It required this concentration of the popular will,

267 världsdel

268 Mosseboprogrammet

with the suppression of all qualifications, in order to dissolve the unified excesses of state power and

estate particularism of the time. It was a program of struggle which had its time and which has done its

service.

Shall one now understand? As the overextended by the idea of absolutism state-will again sunk

into its dimensions in the form of a constitutional regiment, then so must the popular will, overextended

by the idea of national representation, similarly be moderated within the form of an organic societal

representation, with the nation’s internal qualifications once again freed and living. It is not the

universal suffrage which is at fault; it is necessary in order to grant the nation immediate co-

responsibility within its state. The fault is in the general elections269. They belong to the interregnum of

the civic society. Now, the modern body of trade unions around us is laboring to create the new, natural

society on the basis of the association; and it is on this society that the correct representation must be

founded, a representation of interests270, in which the modern society’s great factual spheres of work

tread out before the state, each with their men of trust and speakers, and with that weight alone which

corresponds to their respective value to the commons—this is the solution to the great problem of

representation.271

One sees that this solution is a synthesis of the preceding two, the estate thought’s thesis and the

civic thought’s antithesis. The future representation rest all the more on the latter, which is merely a

euphemism for nationality. The modern classes shall not break it down all the way to the bottom, as the

former estates did, but neither shall it dissolve and vanish into it, as the disorganized suffrage will: they

shall rise up out of it as mountain peaks from a common base. First by this shall the class contrast’s real

necessity be possible to definitely reconcile with the ideal postulate of nationality.

We have previously seen the modern group society in organic connection with the autarchic

household and the harmonic natural territory. As we now see the group society aspiring for political

expression in the representation of interests on a national basis, we recognize one and the same law

working in all elements and within all aspects of the state-life. Everything hangs together in the same

great evolution. It should not be necessary to further demonstrate how the result grows in clarity and

confidence just by this correspondence. Seen each on their own, the representation of interests, autarky,

and so on may be subject to doubt—seen together, as an expression of a common, all-encompassing

thought; they support each other and provide evidence of one another’s truth, which is not easily wiped.

269 samfällda valen

270 intresserepresentation

271 The exposition in the text connects, partially verbatim, to my fundamental investigation on “The Representation

Problem” (“Representationsproblemet”) in Det nya Sverige, 1907, pp. 448-61; c.f. Boëthius in Statsvet. Tidskrift, 1908,

pp. 229-247, and foremostly Wallengren, Problems of Suffrage (Valrättsproblem), 1905, pp. 100-182, where all

arguments against representation of interests are summarized. W. admits himself in another work that the “thought is in

fashion,” and cites an expression in the Danish Parliament that it is “a leading thought among all political philosophers,

who in these moments are occupied by these subjects around the world”; The Two-Chamber System

(Tvåkammarsystemet), p. 18. According to Haseach, Die Moderne Demokratie, 1912, p. 468, it ought to soon become a

“burning question.” According to Zwieg, La reforme electorale en Autriche, 1907, (cited by Wallengren, Problems of

Suffrage, p. 117), there is a “generally growing inclination” thereto. The thought is embrace especially by the right in

various countries (Austria, France, Germany, Denmark) on the basis of their connection to the rennaissance of

monarchy. A prominent representative in Spain is Mella, see Das grössere Deutschland, 18/02, 1915, p. 1700. A

dedicated supporter is also Oscar Schmitz, see Die Kunst der Politik, 1914, p. 434, and Das wirkliche Deutschland, pp.

375-. (author)

But if the representation of interests is the future’s necessary expression of the people’s will,

then neither shall the political democracy be the last word of history. In reality, it hangs together with

the form of the national representation and shall fall back with it. If the state-life in all previous areas

has shown itself as seeking a balance, then it ought not in the length deny this tendency in the area of

the regiment. Under the power of the revolutionary ideas, the 19th century has been striving for a state-

form just as monistic as that of the 18th century, but in the opposite direction: the throne, which it found

before itself in

autocracy, it has broken (republic) or at least degenerated (parliamentary monarchy).

When the forces which now work within the state have reached their aim, then we must in the area of

the legal life expect a new synthesis overall, a strengthening of the specific state-power on democracy’s

own basis, a satisfaction thus of order and freedom alike by a Monarchist renaissance (constitutional

monarchy), or a Caesarian concentration (principate).

It is obvious that this harmony is the ideal. The regiment suffers as much as the household of a

monoculture. Whether the path thereto shall be straight and direct—so that the reaction against the

excesses of liberty ends at the correct intermediate point—is certainly another question. Experience

does not speak in favor of this quick solution; it speaks instead of excesses’ tendency to invoke

opposite excesses, according to the law of the pendulum’s swinging. By this experience I have chalked

out a natural system for the state-forms, where the declining line from absolutism, by constitutionalism,

to democracy (parliamentarianism) is conceived to be replaced by an ascending line through principate

to a new absolutism (Caesarism).272 The last century has witnessed the former series in its irresistible

advance across Europe, and it is entirely natural that one has generalized this developing line to a

constant, much like sailing in the trade wind which never ceases and never turns; it is the politics which

believe that “one can always afford a step to the left.” Experiences of other cycles of time, going back

to those of old Rome beginning with Caesar, and also to some degree to those of the contemporary

America, let us predict that Europe once shall see the course of democracy run out, and then there will

remain a return along the second line, like the summer monsoon’s replacement by the winter monsoon

in regular intervals. It may be a threat that humanity, once it has come all the way to the brink of the

abyss of anarchy, does not stop this course before it has reached far past this too. That an endlessness of

variants and aberration shall cloud the view of the passage for the near-sighted ought not confuse us

about this development’s direction and necessity.

IV.3.4. Loyalty and Thereto Related State-Purposes

Thus: this world, which close at hand appears to us unbounded and accessible to free, rational creation,

shows itself once again caught in the shackles of long and great processes beneath the law of life itself.

Only to the degree that the statesman subordinates his will to its objective tendencies is he able to

contribute to the creation of the subjective legal harmony, the inner bond between people and regiment,

which is called loyalty. We have already studied this phenomenon in its relationship to nationality and

sociality; we have also indicated violent ways of achieving agreement between them (see III.5.3.). All

is not the statesman’s fault if loyalty stands low within a people; the fault may also lie in circ*mstances

272 Festschrift to Puntus Fahlbeck (Festskrift till Pontus Fahlbeck), 1905, pp. 121-149, and Zeitschrift für Politik, 1915, pp.

427-451. The expression of principate is here taken, after “emperor” Augustus’s famous form of government and

Machiavelli’s nomenclature, as an indication of the balanced form of the rising line. (author)

above his ability, within the people itself or in the society; but if the people instinctively always places

the guilt on government, then there is here a justification for the time being which falls primarily on the

government’s responsibility to carefully adapt the form of government according to the great law of the

time-turning.

Therefore find we also changes to the legal regime among the tools by which social crises may

be overcome. The classic example is the “Law of the Twelve Tablets” against the successive

legislations by which the plebeians were received into Rome’s regiment in the 400-300s B.C. In

modern history we see a parallel in the English legal and administrative policy of the 19 th century (the

suffrage rights’ reforms of 1832, 1867, 1884, administrative reforms of 1888 and 1894). Austria’s

parliamentary reform of 1907 was motivated directly as a cure against the disease of the conflict of

nationalities. It similarly strengthened Austria against Hungary in the union conflict, much like

Norway’s democratic resolution of 1898 gave it a determined advantage against Sweden, which

suffered of inner dissatisfaction against the restricted voting right. Sweden’s reform of 1909 stands

therefore as another case of the curative method by the way of law. If the government takes too long to

enact such initiatives, it may happen that the people itself grabs it by the way of revolution: so in

Russia, 1905, in Turkey, 1908, apparently also in China, 1911.

All these cases stand as one sees in the declining line of the legislative curve: they constitute

stages of the still continuing adaption according to the civic society’s and democracy’s spirit of the

time. The ascending line, against concentrated state-power, has a lesser tendency to complete itself by

legal way, of which the Napoleonids’ history in France in their time and the North American now does

not lack examples.

It is not difficult to in such politics under certain circ*mstances recognize up in the legal life

itself an effect of the law of convalescence which we have already observed in geopolitics. The

connection is clear in the Russian revolution of 1905 after the catastrophe in Asia and the Swedish

suffrage reform of 1909 following the dissolution of the union; also the Young-Turkish constitution of

1908 was meant as a treatment for the “sick man’s” distress. So stands the legal aspect of the state too

up in the middle of the river of life, in steady contact with other aspects, affected by them while itself

also affecting them.

IV.3.5. Spirit of the Time and National Spirit in the Regiment

This connection shows itself finally also therein that the legal treatment does not always succeed. The

reform of 1907 in Austria showed itself as oil to the ferocious waves of the national conflict with its

universal suffrage, entirely in error; and sociality has for long times not stood so low in Sweden as now,

following and despite the reconciliatory legislation of 1909. Here the universal suffrage appears not as

protected ground but as an expanded polling station. In a very blatant way it is clear here how little the

state corresponds to its law. The entire political organization is ultimately only a form: what it arrives

on is the living content. This is what liberalism does not realize when it places all of its trust in

regimental couriers: in simpler cases, changes of regiment, in more difficult, changes of constitution.273

The latter history of France is the strongest evidence by the system as well as by its weakness.

Among the factors which play a role here in obscuring the prescription, one is greater and more

generally significant than all of the others. It is the national spirit274: the personal characteristic itself of

the people. She is the one guide of the regiment, where the spirit of the time is the other. From the other

side, she too places limits to the statesman’s freely creative will. She is an atmosphere, through which

the idea of time is to refract before the people may claim it (c.f. III.5.5.). A sound regiment can never

deny its deep bond with the nation.

That is why we do not believe in the “ideal law,” which the Enlightenment philosophy of the

18th century sought for in the state-life as if it were the philosopher’s stone. The effects of this

schematization at the expense of the life of the personality—that of the individuality—have stretched

themselves wide. Most western constitutions have emerged as variations of one and the same theme,

the Montesquieuian separation of powers, or as more or less

poor copies of a common model, in

particular the English law. A great part of the domestic political dissatisfaction comes from the friction

of these abstract or foreign influences against the national personality. It is not difficult to understand

that all states fit in the same form of constitution as little as all feet fit in the same machine-made shoe

number. Even if the fashion in the all is the same, the leather must be cut according to each and every

one’s individual type. If one had learned from England instead of blindly imitating it, one would have

found the correct way right there: a people which on its own lives itself into its law, so that it sits as

“the skin on a body” (Carl Peters). But the same constitution sits on all imitators more or less poorly, as

they naturally do not possess England’s individual circ*mstances of realm, people, household, and

society.

At the same time as the legislative politics pays appropriate respect to general ideas of the time,

it also gives a warning against all too slavish respect for them. By all appearances, the warning is

invoked with respect to the fact that the contemporary states stand at very different stages of

development. Ideas for a certain stage cannot without risk be transplanted to another. The remark is

particularly in its place with respect to the eastern imitation of western ideas of state, which began in

Turkey in 1876 and Japan in 1889 and continued in various countries in the new century. In particular

the liberal recidivism in Turkey of 1908 much like the “democratic breakthrough” in China after 1911

has awakened serious concerns among experienced observers. For an eastern society of their sort is an

old handwriting on decomposing paper: it collapses entirely if carelessly exposed to the fresh air. It

does not tolerate the oxygen of freedom. Freedom too, namely, has its own, by tradition and nationality

determined, districts, and does harm outside of them.275

In such cases, the form of the law becomes an experiment which may invoke more evil than it

cures. If the bodily constitution overall is good, as that of Japan, then it neutralizes the risks and

follows its own laws, even if the foreign form of government is permitted to stay on paper as a

273 “The work of the state, which by its real nature is administration, has in our days been concentrated in legislation, and

thus the misunderstanding has gained root and stronghold in the public consciousness, that legislation can prescribe

cures for everything, and all evils may be cured by legislation”; Reuterskjöld in Statsvet. Tidskrift, 1911, pp. 297-298.

(author)

274 nationalandan

275 “The Answers of the Balkan Wars” (“Balkankrigens facit”), in Polit. Essays, I, 214. (author)

beautiful and untrue advertisem*nt. In another case there may be a danger that the foreign ideas

accelerate the misfortune of the realm.

Once again we see therefore life’s own primacy before all exterior forms. It is good for a people

to have a time-appropriate and overall well-ordered regiment, but even better is a sound and strong

soul. Gustaf Adolf’s time period in the history of Sweden, with its weak legislation, is an example for

all times that the state is greater than its law.

Fifth Chapter

The State Under the Law of Life

Our special reconnaissances of the state’s elements, or attributes, have concluded. The state stands now

before us not as an incidental or artificial form of human co-habitation tangled in juridical concepts, but

as a deeply rooted in historical and factual realities, organically emerged phenomenon of the same

fundamental type as the individual human—in other words, a biological entity or a lifeform.

V.1. Perishability of the State

Another answer is still required to strengthen this result. If the state is a type of life, ought he not also

be subject to the fundamental laws of life, among which destruction is the greatest?

It is now not difficult to find experiential evidence in this direction. That states are born

demands no further evidence than that they exist. That they are mortal, that shows even a cursory

review of history. Where is now the world-dominating Rome? Deeply beneath the ground of the

modern city’s Forum, its memories are unburied by a people which through many blood-mixings has

become another in heart and kidneys. Where is its last most feared enemy, the vandals with their states?

Vanished without a trace other than one name: “Andalucia.” Where is the “Holy Roman Empire” with

its claims on the position of the universal state, where are the highly cultivated states of Montezuma

and the Inca people, where is the Moors’ culturally shining realm surrounding the royal fortress of

Alhambra? Their tombs stand in the vast graveyard of history, revealing how states too depart by the

same path which lies before the individual.

That states may die is therefore not in question. But the question has its right gravity when

expressed as such: must they die? Are they mortal by nature, much like humans? Do they have a certain

predetermined lifespan, upon whose completion they must again be ripped from this earth?

It is with fear that one touches the thought that the dominion of annihilation would extend so

far. While the problem on the account of other states attracts us with the power of the unknown, we shy

instinctively away when it is applied to our own state. The mere thought that our own fatherland276 may

cease to exist repels us innerly. In front of these prospects, it is natural if one in general dismisses the

question by the Buddhist formula of the unknowable: “the Holy One has not revealed it.”

Our research would at the same time betray at the decisive point if we were to avoid giving

ourselves an answer. We will not easily pass the question on the path which we have charted out for

ourselves. An investigation must be attempted—even if we sense that we have reached the limits of the

knowable, where one cannot expect a decisive conclusion from science.

V.2. The Birth of the State

V.2.1. Primary and Secondary Process

To place the problem in the right light from the beginning, we first ask ourselves: how are states born?

276 fosterland

100

Herewith one must (with Jellinek) distinguish between primary state-formation within a legal

wildland and secondary within a completed state-system. The former offers us nowadays no difficulty

to interpret; it is entirely a question of settlement and social organization, a purely practical

phenomenon with no judicial or rational taint. We take therewith a definitive distance away from the

old natural law, which already on this point saw a purely legal question, and found its “delivering”

word in the social contract. It was a scientifically meaningful fiction to the extent that it broke with the

medieval state “of God” and turned state-formation into a human phenomenon; but as history has no

knowledge of constituent contracts by which individuals bind themselves as co-owners within a

political corporation,277 neither do we need such an artificial explanation for a natural case. Jellinek too

admits without hesitation that the state’s “act of creation lies outside the domain of justice,” so that the

state’s “own will is its legal basis.”

The problem begins first with the secondary process: the state’s entrance into an already

complete political map and a jus-gentium-established state-system. How does a newcomer gain space

within an area in which all places are already occupied to the brim, and living law backs the

distribution?

The case would certainly be impossible if the constraints of this law held a secure position—

other than in the unlikely condition that the beati posidentis themselves leave space of their own

goodwill. This has happened; though, it has also happened that new states came to be without this

goodwill of the preceding states in spite of existing

law. This is where the problem sits. In reality we

are witnessing one “happy event” of this kind after the other. The present state-system of Europe is the

most fixed that the world has ever seen, and yet it can in the past century show a birth count of no

smaller number than 11, if we include Albania in 1913: Luxemburg 1815, Belgium and Greece around

year 1830; Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro definitively in 1878, Norway also in 1905 and Bulgaria

1908,278 thereto the modern Italy 1859-71 and the German realm 1866-71. The question of the

emergence of states has therefore full contemporary relevance.

It follows immediately from our premise that a state within a completed state-system does not

come to the world innocent as a child: it is through its own birth burdened by the guilt of having

violated the international law. The extant system with its carefully calibrated and finely balanced legal

relations must be broken through in order to give space for the newcomer; and at the point where this

occurs, a special injustice is done to the one or the several “nearest” ones, namely the states whose

legal area or area of power279 is immediately weakened by the newcomer’s appearance. From the

viewpoint of international justice and morals, every new state’s birth is apparently a scandal, and the

newborn is to be recorded as illegitimate in the church archives.

277 It would then be the apocryphal oath-swearing at Rütli (Rütlischwur), or perhaps the puritans’ “Mayflower Compact,”

see Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the U.S., 1891, I, 30-31. C.f. otherwise Jellinek, especially pp. 274-275.

(author)

278 Only in passing do we note here the technical property that the birthing process occurs as a rule in two stages: first

“half,” then full sovereignty. So, typically, Norway 1815-1905 and the Balkan states, most recently Bulgaria 1878-1908.

See Polit. Essays, I, 42-43, and Dannemann, Die polit. Und rechtliche Entwicklung der halbsouveränen Staaten

Europas, 1915. (author)

279 rätts- och maktområde

101

But history in its great march pays hardly much regard to such notational concerns and

condemnables. Even behind the mask of the international law she is fundamentally her old self, as

when she before any international law created the states through the primary process. The origin

generally reduces itself to the pure life of power and will. The difference is primarily that the demand

for power and will is now so much higher, which stands as a great obstacle to overtake in this case. But

herewith it is certainly not said that the international law lacks all significance on these occasions. On

the contrary, it shall now be shown that it has already had a decisive role after the completion of the

natural act. The world has advanced so far into an international order that the state-system decides on

the reception of the new state into the community or not. But they cannot prevent its birth not its death;

thereof history decides beyond just and unjust.

Now, there are also cases in which godfathers of great politics supervise the entire process from

beginning to end, with more or less respect for natural circ*mstances, as in the case of Albania in 1913.

In such cases something artificial is asserted, which does not bode well for the future of the child. We

observe now the typical process, and shall find that it is in no wise arbitrary, even if it cannot be

impressed into predetermined juridical categories.

The demonstration here ties itself directly to the point where we left the investigation of the

nation’s development toward a state (see III.5.), that is at the declaration of independence; most lately

that of Bulgaria in 1908. This is the obligatory precondition of the modern state-formation: a

nationality which has matured to consciousness. Even sworn opponents ought hardly reject the validity

of the principle at this point. Though real state-entities may have survived on another basis than that of

nationality, no new state ought in the future come to be without this living personality. The state can

henceforward have no other source or basis since the discovery of the nature of the nation.

V.2.2. Reception into the State Collective

The declaration of independence, though, is only the first act of the process. Life creates the demand

and presumption for its acceptance, but no more. For no nation can by its own mere whim oblige

others, to decrease others’ areas of power and alter the existing balance. Bulgaria was for example

unable to force its envoys onto the other states of Europe in 1908, and a state cannot be considered

sovereign without the possibility for diplomatic representation; no less could it condemn Turkey to that

loss of power which its secession was considered to signify. This must depend on yet another trial. The

nation attains sovereignty only by international-legal recognition280 and acceptance into the state-

system.

The connection is entirely the same as that between citizenship and suffrage: right did not come

until the state conceded it. Here it is the collective of the old states—nowadays in practice represented

by the great powers—which constitutes the tribunal. It is tried, thus, whether the national claim is to be

transformed into a right or not. And first when this is done, the state as such is born into the world.

Much like the sanction according to the Labandian theory is the the true birthing act of a law, so is the

international-legal recognition that of a state. It may well happen that it may exist there outside, as a

naked fact, and gradually by assertion grow into the state-system; but the preconditions for such a

development are nowadays very weak and would appear to become even weaker in the future.

280 folkrättsligt erkännande

102

Thus we arrive in any case ultimately at a sort of agreement as a form for the birth of the state—

or perhaps more precisely its baptism—though not internal, but external, with other states. The form of

the law, which the state-teaching of the natural law has placed at the spearhead of the primary state-

formation, shows itself in actuality to be the crown and completion of the secondary; it does not come

first in the process, but absolutely last, emanating from a sort of right of the state-system to complete

itself.

Naturally, those members of the old state-system who are directly harmed by the claims of the

new pretender have the first word at this judgment of the powers. If he stands by his right and asserts it,

as Sweden against Norway in 1814, then the process is already lost from the start for the newcomer. If

he does not protect his right, as Sweden against Norway in 1905 and Turkey against Bulgaria in 1908,

then the procedure is simplified, though the other states naturally still do not have their own votes

engraved.

Are we able to distinguish certain circ*mstances within the goal which on equal ground with

nationality may serve as surrogates for the legal right of self-ownership? One is that the newcomer

must be organized as a state, with a government which is able to maintain order and speak for it; herein

already lied the damnation of the “Republic of Formosa” of 1895 and the “Latvian Republic” of 1905,

nearly also that of Albania in 1913. Another ought to be that the territory in itself is approximately a

natural whole, without significant intrusion upon those of others. But beyond these external conditions

of regimental- and geopolitical sort, much emphasis must also be placed on the perspective of whether

the nation in question has shown itself possessing the ability of independent contribution toward the

common culture of the state-family. This criterion plunges Albania’s stocks deeply beneath their

nominal value, but it is permitted to suppose that this is what weighed the most in the favor of Norway

in 1905: it has for its sovereignty to thank more than any external qualities the poetry of Ibsen, the

music of Grieg,

the achievements of Nansen, and the science of Bugge—these high cultural

achievements have impressed the world, and surely have contributed toward holding back the arm of

Sweden. But what history firstly and lastly demands of a nation that is to be considered worthy of its

highest rank, that of the sovereign state, that is will and power and determination to by deed and at any

cost assert its “personal right.” This is the most decisive factor before the tribunal, simply because

power is necessary to attain it. That is why this rank has been recognized for a nation of 2¼ million

such as Norway, while still denied a nation of 35 million such as Ukraine. In this way, the vital force

makes itself the relevant factor herein too, under the forms of justice.

We have spoken here only of the emergence of such states for whose sake the state-system must

be cut-through and another’s right infringed upon. In events such as the unifications of Italy and

Germany to new great states, the problem is to a certain extent different and more simple. The state-

system may certainly be deeply interested here too, for the sake of the balance, but no right is infringed

upon within this process, as the unification does not move the borders of neighbors. No outsider may

find reason to protest in the name of justice, as little as in the event of an entrance into an alliance or an

“entente.” The vital force works here directly and until the end on the basis of the national solidarity

and with no need for international confirmation. We see here so far a type of primary state-formation

again, though naturally in inwardly judicial forms.

103

V.3. The Death of the State

The complaint which can be imagined comes instead from within. For at every such unification, states

must die; the former small states within the greater nation must surrender their existence as states

simultaneously as the new federal state becomes organized as a real state. History shows that the

emergence of the modern Italy costed the lives of 7 states (Sardinia, Two Sicilies, Tuscany, Parma,

Modena, Lucca, the Papal State) and the new Germany those of 4 (Hanover, Kur-Hessen, Nassau,

Frankfurt a. M.). This becomes on its own a European death-list of 11 since the last time-turning; and

then we have still not counted the entirely artificial and therefore ephemeral state-formations such as

the Napoleonic kingdoms of Westphalia and Italy, or the Vienna Congress’s creations of Krakow

(1815-1846) and the Ionian Islands (1815-1864). Thus old right vanishes here; and when this does not

happen by voluntary resolution, old loyalty may long react against the new victory in the name of

nationality, as in Hanover. To us it stands clear that such a death is the necessary sacrifice for admission

to the full blessing of personhood. When for example Sardinia voluntarily surrendered its existence as a

state in order to rise as Italy, we see here a natural evolution forward and upward. History too gives

here its confirmation when she labels such particularism as pure atavism, gradually defeated as the new

nation-state grows into its call. Satisfaction, and no tears, is appropriate next to such graves. To

dissolve into a higher life—that is for states as for the individual the thought which breaks the edge of

death and denies the kingdom of death its victory.

Do we not in reality stand by the answer to the question of the mortality of the states? There is

nothing which keeps one from interpreting the described historical event as exemplary and of universal

significance. Certainly, we may not yet have been able to establish a determined tendency toward a

racial-political unification with absorption of the nation-states (see III.6.); though this corresponds with

our innermost imaginations that humanity once shall realize its unity also in political form. The lives of

states must flow into this “universal state”281 like rivers into a sea; let be that their separate furrows may

still be distinguished (in the sign of federalism). Here we are permitted to find the biological analogy

confirmed until the end, and this without surrendering our hope of immortality. In light of facts such as

Prussia’s dissolution into the great Germany, the thought of the mortality of states no longer repels us.

V.3.1. Psychological Dissolution of the Nationality (Poland)

But the death list of Europe in more recent times has yet another case in which the annihilation has

claimed its right with no shadow of consolation falling over the grave. Poland did not dissolve into any

greater organic unity, nor give up its existence in favor of nationality, nor die a natural death: it has by

the hands of others been erased from history, in which it was a powerful realm for centuries—it’s voice

in the world was silenced by violence, and its homeless nation lives now in three foreign residencies.

If we look closer to our own days and beyond the borders of Europe, we may note at least three

such cases of similar violent type: Transvaal and the Orange Free State in South Africa of 1902 and

Korea in East Asia of 1910. In these cases, the murderer was a single superior power. In other areas we

see several powers uniting against an intended prey, as in the case of Poland, and begin the execution

by its partition into “spheres of interest”: so is Siam threatened by France and England since 1896 and

281 “universalstat”

104

Persia by Russia and England since 1907, and the same sword of Damocles has long hung over China

and Turkey—in order to ultimately, it appears, move onward to the head of the Austro-Hungarian great

power itself.

In these processes too we find justice and reality in a strange mixture. Poland was divided

according treaties, Siam and Persia likewise, the Boer states conceded their independence by formal

agreements. Such legal procedures shall not confuse us about the essence within a fate such as that of

Poland. It was prepared from within, before the chop fell. The downfall of the Polish state is a textbook

case of the “pernicious anemia” within the state-life, as we have already examined in greater detail in

the chapter on ethnopolitics (see III.7.1.). None of the foreign powers’ partition treaties of 1772, 1793,

and 1795 is therefore the cause of death; they are only moments of the execution; the death sat in the

heart of the state, where nationality had vanished. The result laid before the contemporary eyes: “where

there are two Poles, there are three different opinions.” Deprived of the carrying and supporting

element of willingness to sacrifice for the common good, the Polish people dissolved into the unhinged

self-violence of the individuals; and so, the state became a hearth of anarchy, infectious to the

surroundings (which thereof had a reason to step in), and fell later as an easy prey. The decline of

nationality drew at once the danger upon the state and weakened its power to resist the danger. Our

natural compassion to the great suffering must not mislead us into looking past the organic within this

fate. The act is not tragic, only “negatively pathetic,” to borrow the aesthetic terminology. It was a

regular execution upon an expired people which made its own fate.282

The state of affairs in our days was no different in the case of Korea and to a certain extent in

that of Persia. They have long enough shown themselves to be immersed in a thinned-out vital air. They

led a vegetative existence in elderly weakness. They had nothing to contribute to the common

foundations of humanity. This impotence could not be masked by any beautifying veils, such as the

“constitutional” map of Persia. They committed the sin which is not forgiven, the sin against the law of

evolution. They were weighed on the scales and found wanting. Then it was merely a question of time

before the feet that were to carry them out arrived at the door.

The problem of the Boer state is partially different. It may be

that they did not have much of a

treasure to contribute to the higher culture, from which they had withdrawn by their “exceptions” into a

remote corner of the world; but none have claimed that they lacked in civic sense or in physical and

moral vital power. When violence comes to such states, then one may speak of a true tragedy. Tears are

more appropriate before these graves than those of Poland and Korea, not to speak of Hanover’s.

But by such graves there is also hope, and this hope has after only five years shone over

Transvaal and the Orange State in that the victor has allowed them the first degree of sovereignty

(autonomy) again, in order to after two years award them full federal freedom. Herewith we touch upon

the special phenomenon of reincarnation, whose possibilities in outer measure distinguishes the state’s

undoing from that of the individual. In certain circ*mstances states that have gone under may be born

anew to participate in a later state-system. In reality, all new births of states that have been listed

282 It is certainly not the purpose of these remarks to absolve the executioners of Poland from guilt. As a moment in the

contemporary national renaissance one may note Balzer, Aus Problemeder Verfassungsgeschichte Polens (“From the

Problems of the Constitutional History of Poland”), Krakau, 1916: an attempted Ehrenretterung (“recovery of honor”)

of the old Republic on its most difficult area, that of the constitution. (author) Rzeczpospolita is more commonly

translated as Commonwealth rather than Republic in English today.

105

(V.2.1.) are reincarnations after centuries of interruption—Norway’s no less than Serbia’s or Bulgaria’s;

only Belgium and Luxembourg are excepted. They were flourishing states in the medieval, until

foreign dominions laid themselves more or less heavily over them, and only the time-turning of

nationality awakened them once again to life.

Here is truly a connection that is easy to establish. We already know that nationality is a

dynamic power that may rise and fall repeatedly over the course of the life of a single nation (see

III.3.2., III.7.1.). Its decline denotes the downfall of the state; shall not its renewed rise properly denote

the return of the state?283 And is it not natural that the event itself with its consequences shall push the

scales to rise again? The common sorrow and shame shall without doubt, where all vital power has not

yet vanished within the nation, place the individual selfishness under a healthy pressure in favor of the

national consciousness. Thus external slavery may for a nation be a baptism by suffering toward a

bettering. Herein is hope for Poland too—which the World War now seems to bring to fulfillment.

V.3.2. Physical Undermining of the Nation (Rome)

Thus everything is not yet lost so long as the nation continues to live after the state’s loss of existence.

The state appears here as the more transient, the nation as the deeper nature. But there is a case where

all hope for the state is out of question, and that is the nation’s own death. The death of nationality is a

“spiritual” death with hope of resurrection; the nation’s death is corporal and permanent. For the

modern state is unthinkable without its nation. If the state is lost, the nation may continue to live within

its objective circ*mstances; but if the nation is lost, so is the state lost too, unconditionally and

irreversibly. That is why the ancient culture may have seen a renaissance, but never the ancient state;

from new assimilations, new nations have emerged on the peninsulas as foundations of the new states

ever since the old Greeks and Romans have been lost to miscegenation, like used-up buttons of the

Ibsenian button-molder’s pot (Peer Gynt).

We know already know the way by which they are lost: the “two-child system.” I have once

described it as national paralysis, because it sacrifices every thought of the kin to selfish calculation.

For anemia there is hope, for paralysis there is none. The individual can slaughter the nation, much like

he can slaughter the nationality.

But if we now after two millennia see this disease of the people once again cast its shadow over

our continent, in the clothing of an individualism which here asserts itself in the seemingly most

unassailable area—that is when the great question meets us in its most serious shape. Is this the normal

end for the peoples who escaped the quick death? May we not keep the faith in that death which is a

dissolution into a higher life—shall the rivers dry out before they reach the sea? Shall the peoples, after

a longer or a shorter venture, be forced by obscure laws upon this path of death? Are they slaves of the

absolute annihilation, like us, humans, so that the pot of the button-molder awaits them all?

Herewith, we entirely seriously return to the starting point of this investigation. Neither

Sardinia’s ascent into a higher lifeform nor Korea’s descent into a lower, which may be transient, place

283 The deductio ad absurdum, which Jellinek thinks to find in this “jeder biologischen Analogie spottende

Auferschehungslehre” (“resurrection doctrine which mocks every biological analogy”), pp. 155-56, dissolves here in a

natural context, and casts by this dissolution a peculiar light over this author’s declaration on pp. 153-54: “Mein

Gegensatz zur organischen Lehre ist der der Erkenntniskritik zur Dogmatik” (“My opposition to the organic doctrine is

that of the Erkenntniskritik against dogmatism”). (author)

106

us before the problem of the state’s perishability as directly as the current population statistics of the

France of the strongest development of state. It is possible, and not far-fetched, to interpret this

phenomenon too as exemplary: a tragic solution to the same problem which in the case of Sardinia has

a happy solution. And the interest with which we observe the effects of the World War on this point

(see III.7.2.) grows into a world-historical one.

V.3.3. Necessity of the Death

The question then stands: 2000 years ago, none of the great nations of Europe today were alive—shall

any of them remain 2000 years hence? The question is to a certain degree related to that which is

presented by the modern zoologists concerning the conditions of the animal species: has it always been

natural revolutions which invoked extinctions within the paleontological world, or are the species

themselves internally doomed to eventually dissolve? Another analogy is offered by the kins within one

people, according to Fahlbeck’s investigations, which show them (within a certain population group) to

a high degree subject to the law of perishability.284

Beyond such speculations, we are not able to nor wish to continue further on this subject. Here,

the path of science ends, and that of faith begins. But though we do not find here evidence for the

correctness of our organic interpretation, it is of note that its opponents owe us evidence no less; for the

existence of a state for a thousand years is, accounting for its long life-cycle, no evidence of its

immortality.

This gazing into the unknown has, though, granted us a result, one of immeasurable significance

in practical as well as theoretical considerations. The life of the state lies ultimately in the hand of the

individuals. It is in their power to both strengthen and weaken, extend and shorten it. We do not know

whether eternal life is cut out for any state or even any nation; but we see this, that it to a decisive level

depends on the individuals themselves whether their state may live longer on the surface of the Earth!

V.4. Necessity and Freedom within the State-Life

Looking back at this path whose end we have now reached, we shall not find any real difficulty in

accepting the organic interpretation, according to which also the state is a lifeform under the influence

of the great

18 Monsieur Bergeret à Paris (1901)

19 statsvetenskap; Davidsen (pp. 33-34): “The state sciences include political science, national or political economy,

constitutional law, international law, administrative law, political history, constitutional history, statistics, sociology,

political geography, ethnography, anthropology, forestry, cameral science, police science, and so on … In present day

Sweden, statsvetenskap is much closer to the English term ‘political science.’ Indeed, they are often considered virtually

equal to each other. This was less so … from the late 1890 to the early 1920s, when statsvetenskap and

Staatswissenschaft were wider and taxonomically higher concepts than politisk vetenskap and statskunskap and their

German cognates politische Wissenschaft and Staatenkunde.” See Peter Davidsen, “The Emancipation of Political

Science: Contextualizing the State Theory of Rudolf Kjellén, 1899-1922.” “Constitutional law” (statsrätten) ref. to as

“state justice” elsewhere in this text.

First Chapter

The General Nature of the State

The self-reflection of the political science has led to a realization of the need to widen the circle of the

science. The next question would be: in which directions? From the onset, the question foreshadows a

direct and sharp observation regarding the object of the science.

The method of investigation offers itself here on its own. From the labyrinth of metaphysics one

has partially saved oneself by the teaching which Bornhak (although himself still constrained by the

legal perspective) expressed in his Allgemeine Staatslehre of 1896, that the state shall “not be

constructed by reason, but grasped empirically.” It is the clarification of reality, and not any logical

constructs, that the time demands of our science. For this end does not lie closer than the act of

questioning our experience of the everyday life and what plays out around us in general. The state may

itself, by its actions, bear witness of its nature.

I.1. Experiential Analysis № 1

The Constitutional-Legal20 Concept of the State, or the Internal

Concept

I.1.1. The State as a Judicial Subject

What experience does, then, a citizen have of his state? The first impression would be purely negative.

He has no experience at all. His everyday labors happen without the involvement of the state. He does

not see it. And still the state’s presence is like the air: he breathes it in the judicial system21 which

ensures the peace of his labor. If he then wants to see the state, there is a certain way: namely, to

transgress against the justice; then the state treads forth, as if from the background where it lays hidden,

with determined organs and institutions at hand: police establishments, courts, prisons. And it does not

help to fight against it, which only worsens his case; the state has means of power and enforcement,

against which his resistance breaks like a reed straw.

This is then the first shape in which the state manifests to the individual: a compulsive power

that limits his full freedom. On the other hand, this likewise means protection from other individuals’

intrusions. But, in both cases, the state watches over a determined legal order above the individuals’

transient preferences. Not directly for an individual’s sake, but for the sake of this legal system does it

intervene with force or protection in the individual’s sphere of freedom. Objectively seen, this appears

as a will and a power: a will that knows what it wills, and a power that can enact what it wills—a will

to preservation of the rule of law, a power thereto through specially equipped organs. As such a great

and silent and powerful will does the state exist behind the individual’s everyday activity, surrounding

him with a solid wall of rules in the name of the social order and the common peace.

The first quality of the state, which we then in the empirical way learn to know, does tend to the

strengthening of the understanding of itself as a judicial subject. Without doubt, it watches over the

20 statsrättslig

21 rättsordning, translated variously depending on context.

state of justice and acts in the form of justice, with the means of justice. We establish this and continue

examining the experiences of everyday life.

It will then shortly be observed that the state does not always hold itself passive with respect to

the individual. There are situations (of more or less periodic nature) where the state itself, of its own

volition and without challenge from his side, seeks him out with offers and demands. So, once a year it

comes to the citizens with a masterly posture and demands a share of their well-earned property, in so-

called crown taxes. Once in a lifetime (with certain recurrence), it comes to all well-grown males and

interrupts their private affairs with calls to armed exercise. In purely extraordinary cases it, as a master

of war, seizes the conscript’s entire being, the life itself. We find here once again the purposeful will

and power, now elevated to mastery over the citizens’ property, labor hours, and life. We likewise

experience that the state requires money and means of external defense. Herewith the frame is not yet

broken around the judicial character, as these demands can be directly derived from the defense of the

judicial circ*mstances from foreign and domestic disturbers of the peace—the policing apparatus and

defense establishment have apparently a financial aspect as well. But we sharpen the observation

further. And then our attention falls to one area where the individual may seek and find support by his

state entirely outside of the sphere of justice.

I.1.2. The State as Household and Society

In reality we are surrounded by cases, where the state assists the individual by advice and deed,

including monetary aid by the construction of own homes, the draining of bogs, paving of roads,

vocational education through travels, to here only take a few random examples out of the modern

state’s agenda. This must give the impression that the state is here interested in the individual’s well-

being without any apparent connection to formal justice or the rule of law. And this interest does not

stop at the individual’s well-being. By (completely or partially) taking control of public education at all

levels, the state treads forth with a great spiritual interests in culture. The whole cultural life shows

itself finally falling within its horizon, far beyond the domain of justice.

We have now arrived at the point where we can diagnose, within the state, an interest in the

citizen’s well-being and the national work in its entire width. Of course, even this interest can take

burdening forms for the individual; the state may, for instance, close the way for him, so that he may

not come past it with his plans without first having gained its consent in the form of a so-called

concession. Hereagain it is relevant that the state does not act purely for the individual’s sake and on

his whim. It fulfills purposes above his; it supports him only to the extent that his activity aids these

higher purposes.

But on its own plane it shows a determined interest in all sorts of developments. The closer we

come to our own days, the more this quality of the state’s behavior comes to sight. All the more do we

see the state itself going to the forefront, with own initiatives in trading, other industrial, and overall in

all cultural politics. All the more does it spread itself over the wide area that the Germans call soziale

Fürsorge22: the relationship between an employer and an employee has long since ceased to be a

private affair of the parties involved. All the more is it engaged equally on its own and directly in roles

of economic leadership. Great entire areas of the national work have thus been laid into its ordinary

22 “social welfare”

operations: it runs a more or less monopolized management of important fields of communication,

laws of life, while we on the other hand receive a clarification of the state’s factual

behavior which no other perspective may provide even approximately.

There is in this solution of ours to the problem of the state a great emphasis on the necessity, as

opposed to freedom. In all areas—those of space, nationality, household, social life—we have seen

great necessities emerge with the power of natural laws and place a frame around the statesman’s

freedom of movement. Herewith an element of reason and free will is not denied the state. We have

seen glimpses thereof in all areas, where we demonstrated the state’s capacity to by own ability rework

their space, their national character, their economy, their social harmony. Had we chosen our point of

vantage from the other direction, that is to say taken as subject the state as a cultural form, then light

284 Fahlbeck, Sveriges adel (“The Nobility of Sweden”), I, 1898, “Folks och släkters undergång” (“The Decline of Peoples

and Kinships”), pp. 125-139, Political Essays, I, 10-11. The entirety of this chapter is contained, in part literally, in the

three essays of 1907-08: “The Perishability of States and Nations” (“Staters och nationers förgänglighet”), “Persia, How

States Die” (“Persien, huru stater dö”), and “Bulgaria, How States Are Born” (“Bulgarien, huru stater födas”), ibid., pp.

1-28. (author)

107

would fall even stronger upon this aspect. That has not been our task in the present investigation. That

aspect has enough sharp-sighted representatives, not to speak of interested advocates. There stands the

great majority. It seemed truly of necessity to complete this traditional illumination from the right with

one from the left. The result lies before one in the present investigation. It was clear in itself that it

would entail a different distribution of light and shadows within the problem. But it shall not be

obscured that behind this illuminating effect lie new consequences for the balance between necessity

and freedom: a movement in favor of the former.

Our demonstration is not the drawing of a free hand, as one may often say about the opposite

side. It is from beginning to end made according to a living model. We have on all points observed the

factual states’ passage before collecting the observations together into the shape of a tendency or law.

Therefore we do not submit to the ruling that our standpoint were to be “Dogmatism” contra

“Erkenntniskritik” (Jellinek, see V.3.1. footnote). The difference is in another place. Where the opposite

teaching has only exceptions to establish, there we have dared to turn page, assert the study, and

establish the rule in the other direction. And this rule reads so, that the state is primarily a sphere of

interest and power, and not a sphere of justice: a sensual-rational entity with emphasis on the sensual

aspect.

V.4.1. International Implications

Hereof one sees once and for all the petty power of all connections between peoples. They are subject

to “rebus sic stantibus,”285 Bismarck said. International law is held in such a low regard that even in the

deepest peace new treaties are concluded to confirm existing rights in the question of such an

elementary thing as realm borders (the North Sea- and Baltic Treaties of 1908). So wrote a newspaper

such as The Morning Post in October of 1908 after Austria-Hungary’s action on the Balkan peninsula:

“If a state sees itself in a position to break its word, there are no means of coercing it to hold faith and

promises so long as the broken word does not mean such a great injustice to another power that it

necessitates a war.” It was a grim analysis in the middle of the flowering time-turning of pacifism and

the international legal formation; but that race which has now in the World War experienced Italy’s and

Romania’s falling away from their own allies and declaration of war against them shall not serve to

disprove it.

It seems as it were not even gainful to under such circ*mstances cultivate the illusion of the

states’ high standing with respect to reason and justice. We see them to great cheers proclaim “the

principles of justice and righteousness” as leading stars over the Peace Palace in the Hague; but in

reality we see hardly more of this righteousness than the 7 and 70 cases!286 Rather than to in vain

bitterness count these relapses to sin and only condemn, we ought to finally understand the necessities

under which the states make their way. Then we shall be less surprised by what happens, and may

285 “present circ*mstances”

286 There were not literally 77 cases tried at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in Hague at the time of this book’s writing.

Official online records contain 13 cases initiated prior to 1916. Henry F. Munro, The American Political Science

Review, Vol. 11, No. 3, Aug., 1917, p. 576, refers to “the fourteen Hague cases” as of the year of publication: “five

involved financial claims, two were boundary disputes, three arose out of relations which western states maintain with

communities of differing civilization, two were over seizure of neutral vessels in time of war, and one—the North

Atlantic fisheries case—settled a diplomatic controversy extending over a century.”

108

perhaps also enjoy the glimpses of international justice which in spite of everything is the achievement

of the times. Not as if we were ever to loosen the demand for justice; to expand this spark to a brighter

flame, that is a non-negotiable task; but we are perhaps to find the path not one of judging and

condemning, but of first seeking to understand and later each in his city and state seek to contribute

toward an increased sense of responsibility.

When President Kruger set foot on European soil as an exile, he was welcomed by a French

newspaper with the words: “pardon pour l’Europe—forgive us that we under the power of our

circ*mstances could not do what we wanted and should have!” Something of that feeling is appropriate

at the sight of the state’s lives in our difficult times, and not only the condemnations of ignorance or

perhaps the untested virtue. To understand is occasionally to forgive.

V.4.2. On Individual Duty Toward the State

I do not hide it from myself that these viewpoints entail a deep reevaluation of conventional values,

which may seem widely indispensable. And it has occasionally appeared to me as if I were uttering

dangerous secrets, as I here—in close or remote connection to other modern thinkers and observers—

must reduce the state from the just state of the philosophers and a rational nature to one bound by

selfishness, an entity fumbling under the necessities of life, of lesser rational development than that to

which an individual may elevate himself. Without doubt it seems a more ideal and therefore worthwhile

interpretation to see that untainted higher nature in the state. I have myself in younger years carried

twigs for that sacrificial fire. It comes from a generally widespread faith in authority, which is equally

strong whether the authority is a monarchic tradition or a parliamentary majority. And should it now

too be a fiction, is it not in any case useful and necessary as such? Or how else to deduce an

unconditional duty of loyalty to the state, if the the citizen in development of personality does not stand

lower than the state?

It is clear that we cannot leave this last question unanswered. The answer needs fundamentally

not reach further than the Forth Commandment. The question, as natural as it may seem, is tainted by

the rationalism of the past century, which must in the name of progress be weathered out of our state-

teaching and state practices. It does not know the life itself. It believes that conditions of life are

determined exclusively by abstract factors, justice, and reason. Against this standpoint we place the

imperative of the Fourth Commandment: “honor thy father and thy mother!”

such

as postal and telegraphy services; it builds and maintains railroads, purchases waterfalls and develops

them. In this time of generally increased trade affairs, the state has clad itself into the suit of a

businessman.

It is to note here, that the state of old had trade affairs, to the extent that it by direct ownership

possessed and made use of “domains” of various types. This legislation has in principle, though, always

had a state-financial nature much like the right of taxation; it has served as a stable economic base for

the principal state-purpose of maintaining the rule of law. But the modern state’s earth, forest,

mountain, and water policies go far beyond such intentions; its point of view is the national-economic,

its field of view is the entire society and the entire country. Finally we have now in the war been made

witnesses to how the state has put under its regulation and control as good as all aspects of the social

and the economic life; and one may be greatly mistaken if one believes that this rise of patriarchal

legislation will pass with the war.

The image of the state which thus meets us in the surrounding reality is therefore very different

than the older liberalism’s ideal of a state which only conserved the justice, while individuals handled

the progress. Our modern state is itself a progressistic force, and of all the incomparably greatest one.

The conclusion of our investigation gives itself away immediately and without partisanship: political

science must make space for the state’s social and economic power besides its judicial quality. We can

no longer stop at the dichotomy of Staat and Gesellschaft, as time and life itself has obsoleted it; we

must for the sake of the political science seek a point of origin from which this Gesellschaft appears as

content of the state, a new element of its nature—or two, if we distinguish the economical and the

purely social components (on this later)—next to justice. This is the first general direction in which our

science must expand.

It should immediately come to attention what a great step forward is herewith taken for the

understanding of the political world. It is as if the state itself has grown and taken shape before our

sight, and in the same sweep its judicial skeleton was filled with flesh and blood. It is materialized,

becomes more concrete, and at the same time also more complicated: it shows itself no longer obeying

the law-making powers alone; it equally stands under the influence of economic and social laws.

I.1.3. The Constitutional-Legal Concept of the State in Contemporary

Scholarship

This manner of seeing the state can nowadays, at least with respect on the purely social element’s part,

be said to have gained standing in Germany herself, the beloved motherland of state-speculation, where

the juridical point of view—well not without connection to the system of many states, which offers

such rich material for legal distinctions—had its hearth. Certainly, the juridical fictions are still

defended to the last by an authority such as Laband, but it has soon been half a century since this

teaching received its first serious pushback from Gierke, when he placed the social order as

Genossenschaft to be essential to the state next to the political suborder as Herrschaft. That victory

leans in the other direction is clearly seen if we compare the tone-setting state-teaching of the 1870s,

Bluntschli’s, with the 30 year younger Jellinek’s. To the former, the law is the state’s body against the

state-will as soul and the public institutions as limbs, while the social aspects were viewed as the state’s

external circ*mstances or “basics of human nature.” To Jellinek, the state is not exclusively an

institution of justice, but “mainly a historical-social formation”; the “social formation” and the

“institution of justice” are two separate aspects of its nature, and thus the science of the state breaks

into the “social state studies” and “juridical state studies.”23 Jellineks influence appears to have been

decisive for this dualistic state-teaching’s breakthrough; here we can only in addition refer to Georg V.

Mayr’s distinction in 1906 and 1913 between the sociological perspective, which is occupied with the

state’s “material developmental life,”24 and the juridical, which is occupied with the state-life’s

“secretions of formal justice”; further to Rehm’s demonstration in 1907 of the state as not merely

“natürliche” and “geistig-sittliche,” but also “gesellschaftliche Erscheinung,”25 and lately to Menzel’s

clear conclusion in 1916, according to which the state’s structure rests on two factors:

“genossenschaftliche und herrschaftliche Verbindung”26—solidarity with respect to authority27.

This view appears to be on its way to break through in this country too. Pontus Fahlbeck in

Lund, with his rich social interests, is here a forerunner, albeit more through his productive activities

than his methodological. As a clear expression of the change in perspective, the textbook author Nils

Höjer’s words in 1907 are to note: “it seems to me given that time is now ripe to expand the old

political science’s concept, that it may in itself contain also the economical life of society.” In reality it

is a question of returning to the viewpoint which Hans Järta in the 1820s made so strongly relevant

against the incoming liberalism; his motivation for the state’s intervention in the question of “public

social service corporations” and that of public education28 has gained new relevance in the age of

soziale Fürsorge. Our demonstration so far only draws out the consequences of existing tendencies

within the domestic science.

Here we may especially observe and strongly emphasize that the political science’s orientation

in the social direction denotes the onset of emancipation from the pure law. Jellinek (p. 125) has hereon

said some stunning words, which should not be excluded from our demonstration: “The social view of

the state shows itself as a necessary corrective on the juridical. The judicial studies claim that the

sovereign state is superior to all other organized power and subject to none. But the enormous powers

of the social life, irreverently active in the form of a conscious will: to them, the ruler himself is a

servant. May the lawyer then beware of confusing his world of norms intended to govern the social life

with this life itself! All the formal-judicial ideas of state omnipotence, which in hypothetical form have

their good ground, disappear as soon as one gazes away from the world of juridical possibilities and

into the social reality. There, the historical forces govern which create and destroy this state’s body in

themselves, which exist beyond all juridical constructs. To this nature applies what Hegel expressed

23 Under the latter, Jellinek later also treats the different legal systems, which by Bluntschli are not studied at all undern

allgemeine Staatsrecht (general state-justice), but undern allg. Staatslehre (general state-teaching); see Lehre vom

modernen Staat, I. 1875, book 6 and Jellinek’s Staatslehre, third ed. 1914, ch. 20 (author)

24 materiella utvecklingslif

25 Natural, spiritually-seated, and social phenomenon

26 “communal and hierarchical connection”

27 Menzel, “Zur Psychologie des Staates,” Deutsche Revue, April 1916. In expressions the influence of Gierke is clear.

(author)

28 See Wahlgren, Hans Järta som politisk teoretiker (“Hans Järta as a Political Theoretician”), 1906, pp. 30-33, essay “om

allmänna undsättningsanstalter” (“On Public Social Service Corporations”) may be found in Odalmannen 1823,

committee reservation “om Sveriges läroverk” (“On Sweden’s Public Education”) in special print 1828, both currently

in Forsell’s edition of Valda skrifter (“Selected Writings”). (author)

through his genius words: ‘for the state’s birth, life and death are given no other forum

than the world

history, which is the world’s trial. And its norms are certainly not the jurist’s.’”

So, the science’s nearer adaption to reality means in this way likewise a step in the development

of its independence. At closer examination, though, we shall find that this victory on the one hand is

immediately followed by new risks on the other. The social perspective saves political science from

being swallowed by law; but what is now its stance with respect to the social life’s own science,

sociology? Where does the the natural boundary that keeps the sciences from dissolving into one

another go now? With the youthful boldness, sociology is already stretching out its paws to draw the

concept of the state like a captured prey into itself. The state is, in its eyes, to speak with Gustaf Steffen

in 1906, an “exclusive a sort of social life, and one among other manners by which we spiritually

influence each other.”29 We see also how Höjer presents his further perspective under the title of “social

studies.”30 The state in this thought-pattern becomes a subordinate concept under that of the society—a

mere residency in society’s greater house.

With this tendency to exclusivity, which likes to follow new views, it is worth to be concerned

here that the whole political science may thus throw itself from the legal science’s one-sidedness to the

social science’s opposite extreme. That the danger truly exists, thereof witnesses Jellinek’s impression

(the Preface) that only such works in political science which appear in the social politics’ or sociology’s

fashion, can nowadays count on any larger degree of attention. It seems as if this expansion of the

horizon only comes (so to speak) from ashes and into fire: it places a new vassal relation instead of a

previous one, whereof our science is burdened in an epistemological sense. And when we later separate

the economic life from the social, then national economics step in as a yet another dangerous pretender.

This result already shows that our understanding has not yet reached its aim. We cannot stop at

the Gierkian-Jellinekian binary, well-grounded in observation as it may be. We must continue our

ransacking of the actuality to see whether yet a richer and fuller experience can shape true unity.

I.2. Experiential Analysis № 2

The International-Legal31 Concept of the State, or the External

Concept

Our investigation has thus far stayed within country borders and observed the political life within. It

remains to direct this attention to the political games outside, between countries. Here is an opportunity

for new collation with reality; as witness of reality, we invoke the expression manners of the press: in

them ought the time’s general conceptions be reflected through faithful picture.

Here shall then be worked a direct selection from the press’s discussion on a foreign political

exchange: not for the actual news’ or the political opinions’ sake, but to learn to know the time’s

29 Steffen, Sociala studier, III, 4. By not denying the state’s role as a guarantor of rule of law, the science makes its offers

even more attractive. The state is in this conception a society, a territory, and am organization (see chapter on “the

Being of the State”). Compare to Steffen, Sociology, IV, 1911, where state-science is clearly characterized as a special

social science, esp. pages 546, 549, 552. See further Gumplowicz, Allg. Staatsrecht, 1897, and Grundriss der

Soziologie, 1905, also Anton Menger, Neue Staatslehre, 1904 (a socialistic worker state); compare Stier-Somlo, Politik,

1907, pp. 21, 53, 59-60. (author)

30 samhällslära

31 folkrättslig; note that Kjellén later distinguishes between folk and nation in ch. III.

general interpretation of the participating parties’ nature by the reflection in the words. That the

discussion pertains to the past Balkan crisis of 1908 is not significant for the pedagogical purpose, as

the common ideas should not have changed since then.

It starts with a thundering salvo in Standard: “Austria,” it says, “stands now as the armed

champion of despotism, as the professed enemy of the international law—that Turkey has been lured

into an ambush, attacked and robbed on open highway by one of Europe’s most civilized powers, that

is an unforgivable scandal.” From other directions, this is reinforced by the accusation that Austria has

“fooled Bulgaria into running ahead with its dumb project”; that it has “pushed Bulgaria forward to

gain a pretext itself,” that it “does not hold back from irreverently violating conventions and

threatening the peace”; wherefore it itself also “takes precautionary steps,” and is “ready to give

payback.” One sees “Germany’s hand in the turn of events”; Germany “stands behind”; it has “in

revenge isolated England, it has won over Russia by the prospect of the Dardanelles and Italy with

promises,” etc. In other directions it said that Germany “looks angrily at Bulgaria, while

simultaneously closing its eyes for and excusing Austro-Hungarian trespassing.” For Serbia it is “a

matter of life and death”; it “saw with worry Austria’s advance toward the sea”; now it is “bitter and

jealous,” feels an “impotent rage”; it does not have “the sense to be satisfied with what it has.” Even

Italy is believed to want to “come forth with claims.” England is “angered”; on the other hand, one

seems to have “wanted to spare France’s feelings,” “deliver justice by mediation”; France too wants

together with England and Russia to “put its influence over the scales of justice in favor of peace.”

England and France “want a congress,” while Russia “does not consider congress necessary,” though

“the word came from Russia,” and Germany is “preparing the agreement clauses” for the same. The

main question is whether Turkey will “quietly and submissively join Bulgaria’s act.” It hardly seems

so: is is “protesting,” it “continues rearming,” it “works with all its powers,” it has “committed errors

that shall be repaired.” According to another version it is “disappointed, but not ready for war,” and

there it does not look well: “all that the Porte does bears the mark of tiredness, low mood, and illness: it

is definitely the sick man.” But under all this noise “sits Greece quiet and calm, and looks hopefully to

Crete.”

Needs the ransacking continue? Every reader recognizes the tone of contemporary newspaper’s

articles and has surely integrated the image into his own idea of the world. We see a number of

concrete shapes, great factual realities with human emotions and all sorts of connections to each other.

What are these entities? Powers, we call them usually, mainly in the context of “foreign powers,”—in

other languages similarly Mächte, powers32, puisances, potenza—we also say countries, realms33,

nations, peoples; but in all languages we also use the word state as a synonym. The domestic language

use, which has stuck with a binary of great powers and small states34 for different degrees of the same

kind, is sufficient evidence.

32 Author uses here the English word corresponding to Swedish makter.

33 “Realm”—rike, c.f. German Reich. Also commonly translated as empire, but this is only appropriate in certain contexts.

Once existed in English. Riks- as a prefix is used similarly to Federal in the names of American institutions. Kjellén

himself equated the Swedish word to German Staatsgebiet (“State-territory”), see Davidsen p. 281.

34 stormakter and småstater

Here we meet thus a new picture of the state besides the one that stood the nearest internal-

political experience. A particular linguistic-historical investigation35 has given me the result that this

double meaning has followed the word from the beginning among us. The word does not exist in the

documents concerning the establishment of the Skyttean professorship in year 1622 nor in the

Chancellor’s Order of 1626; with the meaning of a general

nature it was to the best of our knowledge

first used in Stjernhjelm’s “Fägnesång”36, then mainly in the outward sense (“Lord, Thou who … hat

protected our country and state”); it is clearly found in the Chancellor’s Order of 1661, now in both

senses. The notion of the “state” itself thus belongs to the conquests of the Great Power period 37. Since

then it has gradually gained ground and become naturalized, but continues to present itself to our

imagination as a Janus with two faces, one turned inwards and the other outwards.

I.2.1. The State as Realm and People

Now we ask ourselves: under which science do we study this notion of state number two? The answer

calls for a new analysis, and therewith shall without doubt a geographical aspect first come to sight.

After all, we use the words “country” and “realm”38 as appropriate synonyms. The names of Germany,

France39, and so on indicate the same. The territorial point of view is reinforced through the figure of

speech—especially in France—which permits placing the name of the capital, or even the address of its

Foreign Ministry, as a substitute for the name of the whole: Berlin speaks to Paris, and London listens;

Wilhelmstrasse spins intrigues against Quay d’Orsay and Downing Street! The first thing to come to

our imagination at the thought of a foreign power is without doubt the image of a map.

It is therefore no wonder now to find that the modern geography forwards claims on this object

of study as its inheritance and property. Its standard-bearing speaker is here Friedrich Ratzel, the

creator of “anthropogeography” and the reformer of political geography during the latest turn of the

century. Through investigations of the relations between the state and its soil he came to the conclusion

that the relationship is very differently intimate than was previously believed. To him, thus, the states at

all levels of development are to be viewed as natural organisms, albeit as such incomplete ones and on

higher stages all the more tending to the spiritual-ritualistic. Primarily, they are political organization of

the land itself, as well as the attached human mass. “The state is one part human and one part organized

soil”—so does the final diagnosis read.40

As one sees, geography thus makes itself an advocate for yet another pretender to the subject,

namely ethnography. For if the great historical shapes tread forth in territorial image, they appear alike

as unions of men. This becomes the second and immediately following result of the analysis, whereof a

number of state-names witness (either in combination with “land” as Germany, or on their own as

35 At the moment under publication in Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift (Political-Scientific Journal), under the title of “The

State in Swedish Language Usage, Terminological Notes” (“staten I svenskt språkbruk, terminologiska anteckningar”)

(author).

36 See: http://runeberg.org/fa*gnesang/

37 Height of Swedish extent and power in Europe, 17th century. This period includes Swedish participation in the Thirty

Years’ War (1618-1648) and the Great Northern War (1700-1721).

38 country—land in Swedish, may also be interpreted as land in English; realm—same as ft. 25. By country, we denote

strictly a geographical entity, which should be distinguished from similar concepts, such as nation, state, and so on.

39 Tyskland, Frankrike

40 Politische Geographie, 2nd ed. 1908, p. 4, compare to p. 5 and Preface. (author)

http://runeberg.org/fa*gnesang/

Turkey41 and the like). Country and people42 are thus the new state-concept’s elementary determinants.

We meet also a thorough attempt to take the people as the point of origin for the solution to the whole

epistemological problem in Kurt Riezler’s “Prolegomena zu einer Theorie der Politik”43; but it stands

completely isolated, and has stopped just at the schema, while the geographers started with practice

from their beginning. So, we see now a whole school in Ratzel’s footsteps occupied with investigations

of the state-pictures provided by history; as a fresh and representative example may here be mentioned

Alfred Hettner with his latest presentation in Russland, eine Betractung von Volk, Staat und Kultur44,

1916.

Now it is notable that Ratzel himself (in the Preface to his political geography) admits political

science’s right of way to this content: “sollte man nicht glauben die Staatswissenschaft müsse diese

Aufgabe übernehmen?”45 But since the political scientists are content with that their object “stands in

the air,” so may geography fill the vacancy, according to his understanding.

A continued analysis shall eventually clearly demonstrate to us the incompetence of geography

and ethnography to embrace this entire object. One does not need to search long to find that the powers’

nature is nowise exhausted by the determination of country and people. They are the nearest, but

nowise the entirety of its contents. It is something much greater, much deeper, which is understood by

the names of Germany, France, and so on. Without any doubt, we imagine therewith also social and

judicial characteristics; or can one separate the so-called militarism from Germany’s or the republican

constitution from the contemporary France’s face? Can one imagine England without the so-called

parliamentarianism? Such characteristics are subject to change, as are all; but at any particular point in

time, they are indissolubly contained within the given power’s nature. Clearer than ever appears this

connection now in the war: it is not merely with the country and people alone that the parties seek to

overcome one another; we see them also in the struggle draw from forces of economic, social, judicial,

and cultural kind. So “gathers all the historic life in the state,” to use Paul Herre’s pregnant

expression46. The more we sharpen our view, the more indissolubly appears this connection. The state’s

riddle is footed in spiritual depth which the space perspective of geography does not reach. This has

also lately been recognized by a geographical scientist of Penck’s authority, at the same time as he

admits the temptation for his own department to plow this unsown field47.

41 Germany—that is, as mentioned prev., Tyskland, German-land; Turkey—Turkiet, referring to the Ottoman Empire.

42 People—folk. May also be understood as nation, although people (folk) and nation will receive more specific, distinct

meanings in chapter III.

43 The supertitle of the same work reads Der Erforderlichkeit des Unmöglichen (The Necessity of the Impossible). Within

the people four elements are distinguished, all in organic unity with one another, namely: space, race, state, and culture

(language, art, ethic, and religion). — As one sees, this determinacy means a true attempt to cure the epistemological

gap in the area (see further down), the only one known to me besides the modern geographers’ and the old

“statisticians’” (see I.3.). Riezler is the same man who later under the pseudonym Ruedorffer published the noteworthy

work on Grundzüge der Elemente der Weltpolitik (Basics of the Elements of World Politics), 1914. (author)

44 Russia, an Observation of People, State, and Culture

45 “Should one not think that the political science must take over this task?”

46 Herre, Weltpolitik und Weltkatastrophe, 1916 (in the series Männer und Zeiten—People and Times). Compare to Adam

Müller already in 1809: “The state is the inner connection of a nation’s collected physical and spiritual needs, physical

and spiritual riches, inner and outer life, to a large, energetic, perpetually moving and lifelike whole”; cited by

Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, 1908, p. 129 (author)

47 Penck, “Der Krieg und das Studium der Geographie,” Zeitschr. der Gesselschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin, 1916, nr. IV, p.

238 (author)

I.3. The Right of the Political Science to these Studies

We stand therefore before a pure gap in the organization of our knowledge. No reality can be

more real

or concrete than that of these powers, none either of greater practical meaning for individuals; for on

their fate depends ultimately also the individuals’. If education at all means insight into the global

circ*mstances which surround us, then it appears an educational necessity of highest degree to better

learn to know these great facts in their unitary nature; but in the house of science we see no home for

this study, as geography cannot house it and political science does not desire to.

There was a time when one considered placement in a third direction; namely, within statistics.

It was in the younger days of this science; the derivation from statista, “statesman,” was still clear, and

one wanted now to gather in the new discipline as good as omne scibile of the existing states

(“Staatsmerkwürdigkeiten”). Achenwall from mid-18th century and Schlözer from the end of the same

are the best known representatives of this so-called Göttinger school, preceded by Conring48 with his

notitia rerum publicarum of 1660, followed by Stein in Handbüch der Geographie und Statistik, 1809

(continued by, among others, Wappäus). But it catches the eye that one has allowed unity within the

nature of the power to get lost. These studies made loose conglomerates of what was really organisms.

It is the same difference as that between a Baedeker49 and a modern geography. It is an estate inventory,

rather than a biography. The school is also since long dead; statistics have moved on to the social

masses as such, and the powers stand homeless in this science.

We must now sharply place before us the question on how it comes that political science has not

been willing to receive them. Why has it not here raised claim upon its recognized firstborn right? Of

course it has never been able to purely look past the fact, clear as a day, that a country and a people are

linked to every stately phenomenon, and the more farsighted have long kept their eyes open to the

relationship between these accessories and the judicial life. But in the grand scheme one seems to have

taken the connection as purely superficial. At least the territory has, despite numerous attempts,

appeared to be only the frame around the state’s image or a pedestal to his statue or simply a tray on

which the true political science has been served in its juridical bowls.50 Blomberg (1904) probably

expresses the leading opinion among the faculty when he says that in the state there is “a question of a

customary organization, not of a phenomenon of the organic life.”51

48 Hermann Conring (1606-1681)

49 Early German series of travel guides, named after publisher Karl Baedeker (1801-1859).

50 Seydel and Bornhak view the state straight up as a subject to its country and its people as objects. Other written

thoughts represent Droysen, Geschichte der Preuss. Politik, 2nd ed., 1868, who in country and people sees “der Stoff,

aus dem sich der Staat auferbaut” (“the substance from which the state is made”); further Rehm, where he takes the

state as from one point of view a natural essence, but country and people as natural foundations, and Richard Schmidt,

who presents the state as an object for natural-scientific observations as well as judicial-scientific, see further in this

chapter. Fricker, Vom Staatsgebiet, 1867 (compare to Gebiet und Gebietshoheit, 1901), is perhaps the first to clearly

present the territory as an element of the essence of the state. On Jellinek’s interpretation, see ch. 2. In Swedish

literature note Reuterskiöld’s determination of the territory as “the state’s, so to speak, physical basis” or “the body

through which state and people outwardly are individualized and act”; Rätts- och samhällslära, 1908, p. 21-22lll.

(author)

51 Blomberg, Svensk Statsrätt I, 1904, p. 6. Note also Elof Tegnér determination of political science’s field of work in

Lunds Universitets Festskrift 1897: “the constituent state establishments in their development and organization, whereto

could and should be attached a distinction between the states’ external circ*mstances, their land, and people.” (author)

One has stopped at this either-or. Now the powers of history must, in their irreverent struggle of

interests, appear as organic entities. Accordingly one has denied them. The living will and power,

which at home is occupied with protection of the rule of law and “sociale Fürsorge” does not admit to

any relationship with these adulterous wills. This is the answer to the question of why political science

has sought nothing to do with the powers: it has, despite the name, not recognized its object in their

twisting journey.

But if we now, with lately gained experience, directly confront both concepts of state together,

then it will no longer elude us that it is the same state that meets us in both cases, only from different

directions. Germany, France, and all of the powers, shall they not from the inside appear exactly as

Sweden in our first analysis? And ought not our own Sweden from the outside also appear as a “foreign

power,” fumbling and erring in history as all the others, in the second analysis of reality?

It stands before the eye as a mountain. The powers in the struggle of interests stand each in their

own eyes as the legal state, because they internally have their own judicial duty; therefore, they turn

there their legal side, and so the natural aspect is obscured. It may well now happen that interest also in

domestic questions becomes strong enough to explode justice—a typical example was given by

Swedish governmental forces at the beginning of the World War, when they simply placed themselves

above the Instrument of Government’s52 §72, that the central bank shall on demand redeem its bills in

gold—though this is not noticed easily by the citizen; he is accustomed to by his state have a duty

before the court, and he shall also, when it comes to his own state, retain the judicial view long after it

has vanished before the naked eye. But when he turns his eye outside, to other states, then this interest

and this experience vanish, then he sees without colored glasses; and then it shall soon appear to sight

that the judicial side is not the state’s one and only. For if ever it is true in the international life that

necessity has no law. When the struggle for space and growth hardens, then we see the states with the

natural aspect out, so that the judicial side occasionally seems entirely absent in turn.

Do we even need to strengthen the diagnosis with the experiences of the war? We do not judge,

we only observe. No experience in history is clearer than this, that justice in the lands and seas means

little when the powers feel their vital interests endangered. Justice may be dear to them, but life is

dearer. But we understand now also that they are themselves barely aware of such conflicts. What they

themselves do appears to them in the length just; it is only the enemy that appears to fight for the naked

interest. When the English statesman exclaims his “right or wrong, my country,” then it is a paradoxical

rewriting of his true meaning, which is that the fatherland cannot err; the same position, which at

another opportunity is expressed in the official English maxim that an Order in Council must be

presumed as right. We stand before a world-encompassing illusion, which in turn has epistemological

meaning to our problem through its witnessing of the states’—or at least the peoples’—limited self-

awareness. It is a clear reflection of the manifest relationship that in the state are contained both

elements of justice and power, both custom and organic motion, as in all earthly personal life.

It would seem as as if we now are on trail to a practical basis for the juridical concept of state,

and we see that the tracks lead to a pure illusion. It has without doubt been useful to the citizenry; but

to science it denotes a prejudice and a handcuff, whom it is time to

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